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THE 



PACmC EAILROAD— OPEN. 



HOW TO GO : WHAT TO SEE. 



GUIDE FOR TRAVEL TO AND THROUGH 
WESTERN AMERICA. 



BY 



SAMUEL ''feOWLES, 

AUTHOR OF "across THE CONTINENT," AND "COLORADO, 
ITS PARKS AND MOUNTAINS." 




i. BOSTON: 
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., 

SUCCESSORS TO TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 
1869. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 

riELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts 



University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 

Cambridge, 



CONTENTS. 



Page 
Introductory. — The G-rand Ride ... 5 

From Chicago to the Rocky Mountains . 16 

Colorado , . .27 

. The Mountains and the Mormons , . 43 

\ From Salt Lake to the Pacific , . .54 

I. San Francisco 65 

[I. California at Large ...... 78 

I. The Sandwich Islands 91 

iX. Oregon. — Puget's Sound. — The Columbia River 100 

X. Idaho. — Shoshone Falls . . . . 106 

XI, Montana and Home . . . . . .110 



APPENDIX. 

Outlines for a Two Months' Journey to the Pacific 
States by the Pacific Railroad . . . .119 

Table of Railroad Distances between the Atlantic 
AND Pacific Oceans 121 



% 



THE PACIFIC RAILROAD - OPEl^. 

HOW TO GO : WHAT TO SEE. 



I. 

INTRODUCTORY. — THE GRAND RIDE. 

'nr^HE Pacific Railroad — open, is a great fact to 
America, to the world. The vast regions that 
it brings, for the first time, into our familiar knowl- 
edge hold a new world of nature and of wealth, and 
are full of delightful surprises for the lover of scen- 
ery, the student in science, the seeker of opportu- 
nity for power and for riches. It is the unrolling 
of a new map, the revelation of a new empire, the 
creation of a new civilization, the revolution of the 
world's haunts of pleasure and the world's homes 
of wealth. Europe long ago became only a famihar 
panorama, with the surprises and sentimentalisms all 
written in at the proper places, like the " cheers " 



6 THE PACIFIC RAILKOAD — OPEN. 

and "laugliter" of a faitlifully reported speech. 
But thanks to the toughness of day and night stage 
travel for a continuous three weeks ; thanks to the 
greed for gold and the high prices of food, leaving 
no time for those who had gone into this wide, new 
land to look at its scenery, or to study its phe- 
nomena, or at least to write about them; thanks, 
indeed, to the Indians, of whom all sentimental 
travellers have a holy horror ; thanks, finally, to the 
rapidity with which the railroad has been built, we 
have here a world of nature, fresh and tempting, for 
the explorer. The field is too broad, also the vari- 
ety of experiences to be had too great, the forms 
and freaks of nature too strange and too numerous, 
— the whole revelation too unique and too aston- 
ishing, — to be readily catalogued and put into flex- 
ible covers for one's overcoat pocket. So the pleas- 
ure of original discovery — delicious victual for 
our vanity — may not unfairly be enjoyed by those 
who travel within the next year or two by the Pa- 
cific Railroad, and are wise enough, and have leisure 



INTRODUCTORY. 7 

enougH, to deploy liberally to the right and left, at 
salient points, along its track. 

Near two thirds of all the land of the United 
States lies beyond the Mississippi, not counting in 
the outlying purchase of Alaska, which will doubt- 
less prove a very good thing when we have found 
out what to do with it. The Pacific Eailroad fairly 
bisects this vast area east and west, as the Eocky 
Mountains — the backbone and dividing line of the 
continent — do north and south ; the two cutting it 
up into huge quarters, each of which would overlay 
all Europe this side of Eussia, and flap lustily in 
the wind all around the edges. It will take us long 
to learn what there is on and in it ; how long, in- 
deed, to subjugate it to use and the ministries of 
civilization! But with one railroad of two thousand 
miles built across it in four years, and two others to 
follow within the present generation, our strides in 
its conquest are at least on equal scale with its 
majesty and its mysteries. 

Skipping the Mississippi valley as more or less 



8 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

familiar country to us all, and takmg up the 'Rew 
West on the other side of the Missouri, where the 
Pacific Eailroad proper begins, there are four great 
natural divisions in the country hence to the Pa- 
cific. First the Plains, that grandest of all glacial 
deposits, according to Agassiz, five hundred miles 
wide and one thousand miles long, stretching from 
river to mountains, from Britain to Mexico ; a mag- 
nificent earth ocean, rolling up in beautiful green 
billows along the shores of the continental streams 
and continental mountains that border it, but calm- 
ing down in the vast centre as if the Divine voice 
had here again uttered its " Peace, be still." The 
ocean does not give deeper sense of illimitable 
space ; never such feeling of endless repose as in- 
spires the traveller amid this unchanging boundless- 
ness. We used to call it The Great American 
Desert ; it is really the great natural pasture-ground 
of the nation ; and the Platte will yet prove the 
northern iN'ile. The antelope, the buffalo, and the 
wolf are already disappearing before the horse, the 



INTRODUCTORY. 9 

OX, and the sheep, and these, for so far as the waters 
of the Platte may be spread, — and volume and fall 
offer wide promise for that, — will give way in time 
to fields of corn and wheat. 

Next the Mountains, — five hundred miles width 
of mountains, staying the continent at its centre, 
and feeding the great waters that fertilize two 
thirds its area, and keep the two oceans alive. The 
Cordilleras of South America, the Kocky Mountains 
of i^orth America, are here broken up into a dozen 
sub-ranges, with vast elevated plains lying among 
and between ; their crests broken down and wasted 
away for a pathway for the iron track across the 
continent. This section is full of natural wonder 
and beauty, of scientific variety and marvel ; in its 
centre, holding the divide of the continent, lies a 
great barren basin, without living streams, and 
almost without living springs, — a desert, indeed, 
which the trains should always manage to pass 
over in the night ; and beyond, the picturesque 
descent into Salt Lake valley, past majestic ruins 
1* 



10 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

of majestic mountains, mider towering walls of 
granite, along banks of snow and beds of flowers, 
through narrow canyons with frowning sides, down 
streams whose waters lead the locomotive a losing 
race, and turn the train from one novelty to an- 
other, from one wonder to a greater, — altogether, 
perhaps, the most interesting and exciting portion 
of the whole continental ride. 

Now a third stretch of five hundred miles 
through Utah and ]N"evada, whose united territory 
takes in little more than the vast interior basin, 
which, more properly than any other region in 
our extended territory, merits the name of the 
American Desert. The Colorado and its tributa- 
ries drain much of its eastern and all its south- 
eastern portions ; and some of the shorter branches 
of the Snake or Columbia cross its northern border ; 
but, with these exceptions, all the waters within 
its six hundred by three hundred miles' area rise 
and flow and waste within itseK. Th ey contribute 
nothing to the common stock of the ocean. Salt 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

Lake is its chief sheet of water, — fifty by one 
hundred miles in extent, — and is bountifully fed 
from the western slopes of the Eocky Mountain 
ranges, but has no visible outlet. The Humboldt 
Eiver, lying east and west along its upper line, 
and marking tlie track of the railroad for some 
three hundred miles, though fed from various 
ranges of mountains, that cut the basin every 
dozen or twenty miles north and south, yet finally 
weakens and wastes itseK in a husre sink within 
a hundred miles of the California Kne. So with 
the fresh streams that pour down on the western 
border from the Sierra N'evadas, and those of 
feebler flow from the winter snows of the inte- 
rior mountain ranges, — all, so soon as they reach 
the valleys, begin to be rapidly absorbed by the 
dry air and the drier elements of tlie soil, and, 
sooner or later, absolutely die away. Yet, where 
and while they do exist, there are strips of fertile 
land that yield most abundantly of grass and 
grain and vegetables; and where, as in the Salt 



12 THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD — OPEN. 

Lake valley on the east, and in the Carson on the 
west, the mountain streams can be divided and 
spread about in fertilizing ditches, agriculture wins 
its greatest triumphs. 

As a whole, this is a barren and uninterestiag 
country for the general traveller ; sodas and salts 
and sulphurs taint the waters and the soils ; the 
dust, wherever roused, is as searching and poisonous 
as it is delicate and impalpable ; the rare grass 
is not green, but a sickly yellow or a faint gray ; 
trees and shrubs huddle like starved and frightened 
sheep into little nooks among the hills, stunted 
and peevish in growth and character, with no 
birthright there, and often none visible within 
the horizon's stretch of ten to twenty miles ; no 
flower dreams of life in such uncongeniality ; 
wastes of volcanic rocks lie along and around 
rivers that might otherwise be tempted to bless 
the country they pass through ; beds of furious 
torrents slash the hillsides and mar the valleys ; 
while fields of alkali look in the distance like 



INTEODUCTOEY. 13 

fresh and refreshing banks of snow, and taunt 
approach with the suffocating reality. Some of 
the valleys seem indeed to realize the character 
of the fabled Death's Valley of southern J^evada, 
within which no vegetable life ever creeps, out 
of which no human life ever goes ; and yet, within 
this grand area of distance and desert, two States 
have risen and are prosperous, — one planted by 
the fanaticism of a religion, and the other by the 
fanaticism for gold and silver. To these are we 
indebted for our path across the continent; while 
the traveller finds refreshment for his finer senses 
in the subtle beauty of the air, and the palpitating 
roundness of the hills that, with the winds for 
architect, present such forms, unbroken by rock 
or trees, as are a constant exhilaration to the 
eye. 

The final division of the journey begins with the 
eastern foot-hills of the Sierra N"evada mountains, 
and carries us over these, through twice welcome 
forests, of unaccustomed height and variety; by 



14 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

broad lakes of rare purity and beauty ; along rocky 
precipices, unsealed until the engineer for the rail- 
road planted his level on the walls, and the China- 
man followed with his subduing pick ; down by 
fathomless gorges ; through long-delaying foot-hills, 
waste with the miner's ruthless touch, or green 
with the vineyards that promise to heal the wounds 
of nature ; out by the muddy Sacramento and its 
broad alluvials, golden brown with the summer's 
decay, over long stretches of the tule marshes; 
under the shadows of Mount Diablo ; finally, across 
the wide inland bay to the sand-hills that the Pa- 
cific has thrown up as a barrier to her own restless 
ambition, and over which San Francisco roughly but 
rapidly creeps into her position as the second great 
city of America. 

This is but a two hundred miles' ride, and should 
be made from sun to sun, for it takes the traveller 
through already fabled lands in our history, and 
introduces him to that region of wonderful wealth, 
of contradictory and comprehensive nature, of 



INTRODUCTORY. 15 

strange scientific revelations, of fascinations une- 
qualled, of repulsions undisputed, — California, the 
seat of a new empire, the promised creator of a new 
race. And here, the traveller's experiences have 
but just begun ; his curiosity is brought only to its 
edge. Let us go back and look around, and see 
where he should linger, on what it should feed 
itself. 



II. 

FROM CHICAGO TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 

T T UMBOLDT, in one of his solemn sentences, 
prescribes three requisites for travel in new 
regions : 1, serenity of mind ; 2, passionate love for 
some class of scientific labor ; 3, a pure feehng for 
the enjoyment which Nature, in her freedom, is ready 
to impart. These are all very desirable, at least one 
is indispensable ; but my companions may swap off 
the other two for a well-fiUed purse and a good set 
of flannels. We may be as serene and scientific 
and sentimental as the old German traveller him- 
seK ; but without these other possessions, we cannot 
go far or be very comfortable. 

Then we must be liberal as to time too ; the aver- 
age American can see Europe in thirty days, I 
know ; but this is a bigger job. True, with that 
limit, he can be carried from Boston to San Fran- 



FROM CHICAGO TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 17 

cisco in ten days, — allowing for a night or two in 
bed, and one or two failures to connect at that, — 
and back in the same time, and have a third ten 
days to look about him in the mountains, in Utah, 
and in " Frisco " ; and this is better than nothing, 
of course ; but still, comparing what he thinks he 
knows with what he really does, before and after 
such a trip, he will be immensely more ignorant 
when he returns than he was at starting. I cannot 
tolerate the idea of less than sixty days ; and we 
shall find three months devoted to the journey the 
busiest and best spent in our lives. That is as little 
time as any one proposing really to see our interior 
and Pacific States should allow himself to take for 
the purpose. So make a ninety-day note for our 
expenses, — well, say four hundred dollars a month, 
— the average American traveller, in these green- 
back days, will hardly get off with less, — and leave 
a good indorser for any little contingency of delay, 
such as a pressing invitation to visit a " friendly " 
Indian village, or a long call from those persuasive 

2 



18 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

gentlemen of the interior basin, ''the road agents." 
We may as well count railroad travel at an average 
of five cents a mile, and stage at twenty cents, and 
board and lodging, whether with Pullman or at the 
hotels, at five dollars a day. Extras and contingen- 
cies will need all these allowances have to spare, — 
if they have any. 

Prejudices against sleeping-cars must be con- 
quered at the start. They are a necessity of our 
long American travel. There are often no inviting 
or even tolerable places for stopping over night, 
and, besides, we cannot afford to lose the time, when 
so much of beauty and interest lies beyond. But 
the Pullman saloon, sleeping, and restaurant cars of 
the West — as yet unknown in the Atlantic States 
— make a different thing of railroad travelling from 
what it is in the close, cramped, ill- ventilated, dirty 
box-cars of common experience. They introduce a 
comfort, even a luxury, into life on the rail that 
European travel has not yet attained to. For the 
Pacific Kailroad excursions these cars will be offered 



FROM CHICAGO TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 19 

to private parties on special charter ; that is, one or 
two dozen people may club together, and hire ono 
for their home by day and night as they ride through 
to the Pacific coast, and back, stopping over with 
them wherever they choose on the route. By day 
they are open, roomy, broad-seated cars ; by night 
they offer equally comfortable beds, with clean linen 
and thick blankets ; with as good toilet accommo- 
dations as space will allow, and a servant at com- 
mand constantly. Those with a kitchen furnish a 
meal to order, equal to that of a first-class restau- 
rant, and with neat and fresh table appointments. 
But the eating-stations on the whole route already 
average respectably ; some of them are most excel- 
lent ; and all will soon be at least good. The mod- 
eTn American mind, especially that of the Western 
type, gives intelligent thought to the food question ; 
and one of the surprises before us is the excellent 
victuals they will give us on the Pacific coast. 

The Pullman cars go along with all through 
trains, and the independent traveller can make such 



20 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

use of tliem, day or niglit, as lie chooses to pay for. 
Those for sleeping only are attached to the trains as 
night approaches, and dropped in the morning, while 
the traveller resumes his place in the regular cars 
of the road. But travellers who can afford the 
extra expense will choose either to share in a spe- 
cial charter of one for the round trip, or engage a 
particular seat and berth in a regular one for so far 
as they may be going without stopping. To under- 
stand the advantages of these cars, and learn how 
best to make use of them, is a part of the education 
of the traveller in new America. Their introduction 
and development and popular use mark an era in 
the history of railroad travel, and place America at 
the head of nations in its convenience and com- 
fort. 

Though Pullman promises to back one of these 
cars to order up at our very doors in Boston or N'ew 
York, we shall naturally take up our grand journey 
at Chicago. This is just one third the way across 
the continent, and the beginning of the New West, 



FROM CHICAGO TO THE ROCKY ;M0UNTAINS. 21 

whose spirit is nowhere so proudly rampant, into 
whose growth no other city so intimately enters. 
The pulse of the Pacific beats with electric sym- 
pathy on the southern shore of Lake Michigan; 
and if Chicago does not hear every blow of the 
pick in the depths of the gold-mines of Colorado 
and Montana, she at least has made sure to fur- 
nish the pick, and to have a claim on the gold 
it brings to light. 

One this spring, two this summer, three in the fall, 
and another year four roads invite us across Illinois 
and Iowa to the junction of the Pacific road proper 
on the Missouri Eiver. This five hundred mile ride 
is through the best of the rich prairie country of the 
Mississippi Valley. If it is stranger to us, it will 
arouse our enthusiasm by its wide-reaching open- 
ness, the evidences of its fertility, and the signs of 
its civilization and prosperity ; if we have been in- 
troduced before, we shall even the more wonder at 
the rapidity of its growth and the wealth of its ac- 
cumulating harvests. It is quite worth while to stop 



22 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

a day either on the Mississippi Eiver at Clinton, or 
Davenport, or Burlington, or at some such town as 
Geneva or Dixon in Illinois, or Grinnell or Des 
Moines in Iowa, and see more closely than the cars 
permit the character and culture of this most inter- 
esting region and its population. Last year, before 
the Pacific EaUroad was open, it was the New "West; 
now it is the Old ; but it will always be the garden 
and granary of the continent. It is our new New 
England ; here the Yankee has broadened and soft- 
ened ; and what he can do, what he has done here, 
with a richer soil, a broader area, a larger hope, and 
a surer realization, is worth the scrutiny of every 
American and every student of America. Those 
who would understand the sources of American 
wealth, and the courses of American politics and 
religion, must understand Illinois and Iowa. New 
England is, indeed, dwarfed in the larger life of the 
meUower regions of the Eepublic. It may be the 
taunt of her enemies, that hers is a departed sceptre, 
is substantially true ; but she has a resurrection here. 



FROM CHICAGO TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 23 

and her sons and daughters have come to a new glory 
in these prairies, heavenly by comparison with her 
sterile hillsides. Stop and see if you recognize them 
in their new robes. 

Council Bluffs, the depot of the gathering lines of 
the East, and Omaha, opposite, the starting-point of 
the grand continental line, challenge attention for the 
striking diversity and yet striking similarity of their 
locations on the bottoms and bluffs of the Missouri 
Eiver, as well as for the wonderful rapidity of their 
growth and their large future promise. Four rail- 
roads come in already from the East at Council 
Bluffs ; very soon the number will be doubled ; and 
with these and the swift and strong Missouri rolling 
between, and carrying steamboats two thousand 
miles north to the very line of British America and 
the Eocky Mountains, and two thousand miles south 
to the Gulf of Mexico, the two towns are surely to 
be one of the largest centres of traffic and travel on 
the continent. 

We shall not need to stop for the next five 



24 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

hundred miles. The first hundred and fifty are a 
repetition of the Iowa we have left behind, — rich 
rolling prairies, already broken by plough, or 
smoothed with the track of the mower, — beyond, 
the grand Plains proper, cut by the Platte, with 
wood-houses and water-spouts every twelve or 
fifteen miles, and workshops and eating-houses 
every seventy - five or one hundred ; the road 
straight as an arrow across the whole region, 
and apparently as level as the floor, though ac- 
tually rising steadily at the rate of ten feet to 
the mile for the entire five hundred miles ; there 
is enough of the ride over it to satisfy curiosity 
and exhaust its novelty, — there is none too much 
to absorb the grand impressions of vastness, and 
majesty of area, and take in the glory of sunset 
and sunrise along the unending horizon. The 
Plains introduce us, also, to that dry, pure atmos- 
phere — that cloudless sky and far-reaching vision 
— which is the great and growing charm of the 
whole region from the Missouri Eiver to the Pacific 



FKOM CHICAGO TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. 25 

Ocean. Moving westward from Kew England, there 
is a constantly increasing dryness of atmosphere, 
with a broadening sweep and power for the eye; 
but, after getting fairly outside Eastern influences 
upon the Plains, it takes on a positive presence, 
and the traveller feels it as a beauty, as an exhil- 
aration, an inspiration to every sense. It sur- 
rounds him with a new world ; it infects him 
with a new spirit ; and it hangs the banners 
of pleasure and of beauty over experiences and 
upon forms that never would have borne them 
under different skies and in a denser atmosphere. 
The nights become cold also. Glaring as may 
have been the day's 9un, and searching its heat, 
the evening brings refreshing coolness, and the 
night need of blankets. This phenomenon, too, 
will attend him through all the new countries he 
is now entering upon. 

At Cheyenne the Plains end and the Mountains 
begin — in the eye of faith and the figures of 
railroad subsidies. The hills at least come into 



26 THE PACIFIC RAILKOAD — OPEN. 

sight, and though, the track goes forward through 
an open country, the shadows of the great Eocky 
Mountain belt fall faintly around us. Cheyenne 
wondered and waited long, but finally determined 
to be a town. Colorado makes its connection here 
with the continental road ; it is as high up — near 
six thousand feet above the sea level — as that 
road will care to have the winter quarters of its 
supplies and machinery ; it is far enough away 
to be out of the shadow of Omaha, and Denver 
lies one hundred miles to the south, and is off 
the main route. So the town has several thou- 
sand settled population, and is steadily growing. 
But here we must switch off the main track. 
We must see Denver, the real Eocky Mountains, 
which the railroad cheats us of, their grand 
snow peaks and their wonderful wide parks, the 
scene and the source of the central life of the 
continent, before we shall talk with the Mor- 
mons, hear the sigh of the Sierra ISTevada pines, 
or listen to the roll of the Pacific waters. 



III. 

COLORADO. 

nr^HOUGH Colorado lies below the line of our 
first Pacific Eailroad, and above the second, 
which I take it will be the southern, she cannot be 
refused a first place among their revelations. Be- 
cause of her mountains, which turn the tracks north 
and south, she allures the lovers of the grand and 
picturesque in scenery; because of her mines of 
gold and silver, she seduces the greedy for gain ; 
because of the agricultural resources of her plains 
and her valleys, she will have steady growth, per- 
manent prosperity, and nforal rectitude, for these 
are the gifts of a recompensing soil ; because of her 
many and various mineral springs, soda, sulphur, 
and iron, and of her wonderfully clear, dry, and 
pure atmosphere, she will be the resort of the 
health-seeking. Within her borders the great con- 



28 THE PACIFIC EAILROAD — OPEN. 

tinental mountains display their most magnificent 
proportions, tlie great continental rivers spring from 
melting snows, the plains most warmly invite the 
farmer and the hushandman, and the best popula- 
tion, between the Missouri Eiver and California, has 
organized itself into a State. Fifty thousand people 
here have more than become self-supporting; they 
are already wealth-producing ; and social order and 
its institutions of education and religion are estab- 
lished. The main Pacific Eailroad wisely hastens 
to connect itself with them by a branch from Chey- 
enne to Denver ; and St. Louis " builded better than 
she knew," after all, when, in the apparent spirit of 
a blind rivalry, she pushed her Eastern Division 
Pacific Eoad straight towards their centre. Failing 
to go through the mountains, this road will yet find 
recompense in furnishing the most direct communi- 
cation between Colorado and the East, and in throw- 
ing out branches from its terminus here, through 
the best agricultural sections of Colorado, to the 
main continental lines above and below. 



COLOEADO. 29 

If the branch track is not laid to Denver when 
we leave Cheyenne, so much the better. The stage 
ride of this one hundred miles is an experience to 
which I welcome the stranger. It is the best repre- 
sentation of that sort of travel which the rapid 
progress of our railway system has left us. Fine 
Concord coaches, six sleek and gay horses in every 
team, changed each ten miles, good meals on the 
way, the road itself generally smooth and hard over 
the open, rolling prairie, the sky clear, the air an 
inspiration, the open ocean of the plains on one 
side, the long and high mountain battlements shad- 
owing us on the other, — altogether, this is as fine a 
bit of out-door life, by day, as will come within the 
range of all our summer's journey. By night — for 
the ride covers the night, as well — new elements 
come in, which I forbear to detail ; but if my com- 
panions served in the war, or have tended sick and 
cross babies through a winter's night, when they 
had the toothache themselves, I am sure they wiU 
survive it. 



30 THE PACIFIC EAILROAD — OPEN. 

We shall like Denver, spread out upon the rising 
plain, with the Platte Eiver flowing through and 
around it, with broad streets and fine blocks of 
stores, and a panoramic mountain view before it, 
such as rises before no other town in all the circle 
of modern travel. For one hundred miles, but- 
tressed on the north by Long's Peak, and on the 
south by Pike's Peak, each over fourteen thousand 
feet high, its line of majestic rock and snow peaks 
stretches before the eye, ever a surprise by its vari- 
ety, ever a beauty by its form and color, ever an 
inspiration in its grandeur. The Alps from Berne 
do not compare with the Pocky Mountains from 
Denver ; in nearness, in variety, in clearness of 
atmosphere, in grand sweep of distance, in majes- 
tic uplifting of height, these are vastly the supe- 
rior. Any man with a susceptibility to God's 
presence in nature must find it very easy to be 
good in Denver. Certainly, to watch these moun- 
tains through the changes of light and cloud of 
a summer's day and evening is a joyful experience. 



COLORADO. 31 

worth coining from a long distance to Denver to 
share. 

The mining centres of Colorado are up among 
its mountains, twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five 
miles from Denver, which is but the political and 
business capital, and thus facilities exist for travel 
into the regions whither we would go for knowl- 
edge and joy of nature. Ten hours of staging 
take us through Central City, the chief gold- 
mining centre, at a height of seven thousand feet 
above the sea, with a population of several 
thousands, on to Georgetown, two thousand feet 
higher, the centre of the silver production, with 
nearly three thousand inhabitants. The way is 
full of mountain and valley scenery of freshest 
interest and majestic beauty. At Idaho and Fall 
Eiver, little villages in the South Clear Creek 
valley, on the route, are accommodations for sum- 
mer visitors, with cold and warm soda springs at 
the former place, furnishing most luxurious bath- 
ing. And at Georgetown, with larger and better 



32 THE PACIFIC EAILROAD — OPEN. 

hotels, we are in the very centre of the highest and 
finest mountain life in the State. 

Gray's Peaks, the highest explored summits of 
Colorado (14,300 and 14,500 feet high), and named 
for the distinguished Cambridge botanist, lie just 
beyond and above the town, and the excursion 
to and from their tops may easily be made in a 
day with guide and horses from Georgetown. The 
working of mines up as high as twelve thousand 
feet has secured a wagon-road two thirds the 
way, and trails for horses lead to the two sum- 
mits of the mountain. The view from either of 
a clear morning is the most commanding and im- 
pressive, I truly believe, within the range of all 
ordinary American or European travel. Nothing 
in the Alps takes you so high, reaches so wide. 
There we overlook a petty province ; here the 
broad American continent spreads itself around 
us as a centre, and stretches out its illimitable 
lengths before the eye. The rain-drops falling on 
one coat sleeve flow off to the Pacific, on the other, 



COLOEADO. 33 

to the Atlantic. We are at the very apex, the ab- 
solute physical centre, of the IN'orth American 
continent ; the scene assures the thought, and is 
worthy of the fact. Fold on fold of snow-slashed 
and rock-ribbed mountains lie all around, ■ — west, 
east, north, and south ; they riot in luxuriant mul- 
tiplicity ; for this is the fastness, the gathering and 
distributing point of the grand continental range; 
while away to the east lies the gray-green sea of 
the plains, and distributed among the snow-folds of 
the mountains are miniature copies of the same, 
which look like patches of prairie amid the conti- 
nent of mountains, yet are, in fact, great Central 
Parks, from ten to thirty miles wide and forty to 
seventy miles long. I^orth, Middle, South, and San 
Luis Parks, — they lie along through the whole 
line of central Colorado, — great elevated basins 
or plains, directly under the highest mountains, 
— soft and smooth ways upon the very backbone 
of the continent. Some lie on the Atlantic side, 
others on the Pacific side of the divide ; and" their 

3 



34 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

height above the sea level ranges from seven thou- 
sand to ten thousand feet. In Europe or in iN'ew 
England this height in this latitude would be 
perpetual barrenness, more likely perpetual ice 
and snow ; but here in Western America grains 
and vegetables are successfully cultivated, and 
cattle graze the year round at seven thousand 
feet, while between that and ten thousand feet 
there is rich summer pasturage, and often great 
crops of natural grass are cured for hay. 

These great fertile areas among the high moun- 
tains of Colorado — this wedding of majestic hill 
and majestic plain, of summer and winter, of 
fecund life and barren rock — present abundant 
attractions for a full summer's travel. Eor the 
lover of the grand and the novel in nature, or 
the weary seeking rest from toil and excitement, 
our country offers nothing so richly recompens- 
ing as a summer among the parks and moun- 
tains of Colorado. The dryness of the climate, in- 
viting to out-door hfe, is favorable to lung difficul- 



COLORADO. 35 

ties, thoiigli the very thin air of the higher regions 
must be avoided by those whose lungs are quite 
weak. Asthma and bronchitis flee before the breath 
of this dry, pure atmosphere, and it operates as an 
exhilarating nerve-tonic to all. Denver and St. 
Louis are about in the same latitude, and their ther- 
mometers have nearly the same range, though Den- 
ver is nearly six thousand feet higher. Its noons are 
probably warmer, as its nights are certainly cooler, 
the year round ; but the drier and lighter air, ever in 
motion from plain and mountain, makes its summer 
heats always tolerable. Denver is exposed to snow 
from October to May, but it rarely stays long ; 
sleighing is as much of a novelty as at Washington 
or Philadelphia, and its winters are more like a dry, 
clear E"ew England November than any other sea- 
son of the East. The valleys and parks of the 
mountains are similar in chmactic character, with 
the added influences of three or four thousand feet 
greater elevation. The principal snows are in early 
spring, and the rains in late spring and early sum- 



36 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

mer. Midwinter and midsummer are imiformly dry 
and clear. When clouds and storms do come, they 
are always brief. The sun soon shines through 
them to warm and clear the sky. 

The saddle and the camp are the true conditions 
of extended travel or a summer's life in Colorado. 
A party of four, well-mounted on mules or Western 
ponies, with a guide and servant, and two pack- 
mules for tents and blankets and food, carl gain 
such experience of rare nature, such gift of health, 
such endowment of pleasure, in leisurely travel over 
its mountains and among its parks, lingering by the 
side of their beautiful lakes and their abundant 
streams fat with trout, basking in its sunshine, 
hunting in its woods, and bathing in its mineral 
springs, as nowhere else that I know of in all 
America. This is surely destined to be " the correct 
thing to do " for the pleasure and health seekers of 
the future America. 

Over in Middle Park, two days' horseback ride 
from Georgetown, are the famous Hot Sulphur 



COLORADO. 37 

Springs, a doudhe-bath and a sitz-bath united, 
sucli as only experience of their wondrous tonic 
can appreciate. The water is of the temperature 
of 110° Fahrenheit, — as hot as human flesh can 
loear, — and pours over a ledge of rock ten feet high 
into a pool below with a stream of four to six 
inches in diameter. When wagon-roads are made 
to the spot, as they soon will be, invaMs will flock 
to these springs in July and August from the 
whole country. Already they. are a favorite local 
resort, despite the hard climb over the mountains 
into the valley where they lie. 

The South Park is the most attractive and most 
frequented of these elevated park areas ; and a good 
wagon-road from Denver, branching out within the 
park to all its various sections, and taverns and 
mining villages strung freely along one and through 
• the other, invite the traveUer to its easy enjoyment. 
Mount Lincoln, the great parent mountain of the 
parent range, stands at the northwestern angle of 
the park, and may be ascended without too severe 



38 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

labor from the village of Montgomery. It is of 
nearly or quite the same height as Gray's Peaks, 
and commands a like view. The connoisseurs in 
mountain views in Colorado dispute as to which 
smnmit offers the wider and grander. Either is 
grand enough, and one or other should be enjoyed 
by every visitor to Colorado. Our ascent of Lin- 
coln was made amid contending^ torrents of rain, 
snow, hail, and sunshine, and though the views we 
obtained were not so complete and satisfactory as 
those from Gray, the experience was perhaps the 
grander, because of its variety, and the terrible im- 
pressiveness of a storm on the mountain-tops, open- 
ing and closing long glimpses of ghastly worlds of 
rocks and snow below and all around us. 

The upper mountains of Colorado ^ at eleven 
thousand and twelve thousand feet — hold numer- 
ous pools and lakes, and not infrecLuent waterfalls. 
A party who made the ascent of Long's Peak for the 
first time, last season, report nearly forty lakes in 
view at once ; but the parks and lower ranges offer 



COLORADO. 39 

them but rarely. A day's ride, in saddle or wag- 
on, out of South Park, over into the valley of the 
Upper Arkansas, — where various new beauties of 
scenery await the explorer, — will carry us into the 
presence of the Twin Lakes, as beautifully lying 
sheets of water as mountains ever guarded or sun 
illuminated. They hold kinship with the Cumber- 
land lakes of England, the Swiss and Italian lakes, 
and those of Tahoe and Donner in the California 
Sierra !N"evada, which are among the sweet revela- 
tions of the Pacific Eailroad. The Twin Lakes will 
be one of the specialties when the world goes to 
Colorado for its summer vacations. 

The tree life of the Eocky Mountains is meagre ; 
pines and firs and aspens (or cottonwood) make up 
its catalogue; nor are these so abundant or so rich 
in size or beauty as to challenge special attention. 
They grow in greatest luxuriance at elevations of 
from eight to eleven thousand feet ; and the timber 
line does not cease till nearly twelve thousand feet 
is reached. A silver fir or spruce is the one charm 



40 THE PACIFIC EAILKOAD — OPEN. 

among the trees. But the flora is more varied and 
more beautiful ; Dr. Parry reports one hundred and 
forty-one different species in these higher moun- 
tains, eighty-four of which are peculiar to them ; and 
I can report that nowhere else have I gathered such 
wealth — in glory of color and perfection and num- 
bers — of fringed gentians, harebells, painter's brush, 
buttercups, larkspurs, child sunflowers, dandelions, 
and columbines, as on these eight and ten thousand 
feet high hillsides, or in little nooks of grass and 
grove still higher. Blue and yellow are the domi- 
nant colors ; but the reds flame out in the painter's 
brush and the kernel of the sunflowers, like beacons 
of light amid darkness. With much lacking in de- 
tails of beauty and interest, that are found in the 
country life of l^ew England and the Middle States, 
as in California, Colorado more than redeems her- 
self by the charm of her atmosphere and the mag- 
nificent majesty of her mountains and her plains. 
These are her title to supremacy, her claim to be 
to America what Switzerland is to Europe. 



COLORADO. 41 

But I cannot hope my Pacific Eailroad travellers 
will give more than seven or ten days to Colorado, 
— an appetizer for a future summer's feast, — and 
I rely on the patriotic and thrifty citizens of 
Denver and Georgetown to perfect some arrange- 
ments by which, in that time, they may get a fair 
glimpse of its grand and rare specialties of moun- 
tain ranges and enfolded parks, and a share in 
the out-door life they invite. A ride up through 
the mountains by Boulder Creek or South Clear 
Creek valleys, on to the head of the latter above 
Empire or at Georgetown, the ascent of Gray or 
Lincoln, and a peep into and a cut across the 
South Park, with two or three nights in camp, 
and a half-day's trout - fishing, — these I con- 
sider essential ; and under good guidance they 
may all be had within the time mentioned. As- 
cending Gray's Peaks from Georgetown, I should 
recommend going down on the other side, and a 
night's camp on the Snake Kiver; thence to 
the junction of the Snake, the Blue, and Ten 



42 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

Mile Creek; up the Blue to Breckinridge; over 
the Breckinridge Pass into South Park at Ham- 
ilton or Fairplay ; and thence, if there is not 
time for Lincoln or the Arkansas Lakes, across 
the Park and out to Denver by Turkey Creek 
Canyon and the Plains. All this could be put 
into seven days from Denver, though ten would 
be better ; but, through lack of a wagon-road from 
Georgetown over to Snake Eiver, it would have 
to be done in part or altogether in the saddle. 
Hotels could be reached for all but one or two 
nights ; but these may be made, with fortunate 
camping-ground, choice companions, and plenty 
of blankets and firewood, the most memorable 
and happy of the whole week. 

With such experience as this, we go back to 
the railroad at Cheyenne, with a new sense of 
the greatness of America, with a curious doubt- 
ing wonder as to what can lie beyond, and with 
appetites that we shall probably have to go to 
Pord's to satisfy, while waiting for our train for 
Salt Lake City. 



lY. 

THE MOUNTAINS AND THE MORMONS. 

T3 ESUMING- the cars, for the grand ride over 
the Eocky Mountain section of the track, 
an hour or so from Cheyenne takes us to Sherman, 
the highest point (8,200 feet) of the entire railroad 
line. But we feel rather than see the evidences of 
tlie fact. The air is thin and chill, even under a 
July or August sun ; but it is a high plain, and 
not mountain-tops, that the track rests upon. There 
are bare, smoothly-rounded hills about ; scattered 
over them are huge boulders, or piles of boulders, 
like remnants of mountains ; but the mountains 
themselves stand far away in the dim distance; 
and the train speeds free and nearly straight over 
an open and comparatively level country, crossing 
an occasional deep ravine or river-bed, cutting 
through a rare rock remnant of the original hill- 



44 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

tops, but altogether finding easy pathway through 
the one hnndred and fifty miles that counted, in the 
government subsidy, as peculiarly the mountainous 
section, and had the exceptional allowance of 
$48,000 a mile. A clean reddish granite, ground 
fine by nature, makes the most compact and en- 
during of road-beds ; the ties come from thin for- 
ests in the distant hills ; and altogether we are still 
in a paradise for railroad contractors. 

Down and on from Sherman a thousand feet and 
twenty-five miles the land grows more level still, 
and the Laramie Plains spread a broad fifty miles 
around us. They are like one of the parks below in 
Colorado, only the mountains do not lie so close and 
commanding around, and the views are less pictu- 
resqu.e and nature less rich ; but the neighboring 
hills will repay the sportsman. A considerable 
village is springing up at Laramie ; the Plains are 
famous in overland emigrant travel, and were long 
headquarters for the government supplies and sol- 
diers in the mountains ; and those of us who failed 



THE MOUNTAINS AND THE MOEMONS. 45 

to look into the parks of Colorado will be well re- 
paid for stopping here a day or two. 

Beyond, the country grows gradually barren ; and 
after crossing the ^^Torth Platte Eiver, we enter upon 
one hundred and fifty miles of desert, — a waterless, 
treeless, grassless, rolling plain, the soil fine, dry, 
and impregnated with alkali, the air pure, dry, and 
cool, — a section shudderingly remembered by slow- 
travelling emigrants, and memorable in the history 
of railroad construction for the necessity of having 
a special water train to supply the workmen and 
the engines while carrying forward the work through 
it. Eightly named Bitter Creek gathers the slug- 
gish surface waters it furnishes, and carries them 
on to Green Eiver, reaching which we enter upon 
new and better scenes. The water increases and 
freshens, the verdure improves ; but thajb which 
attracts the traveller most is the novel and impos- 
ing forms of architecture that IRature has left to 
mark her history upon these still open plains. Long, 
wide troughs, as of departed rivers ; long level em- 



46 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

bankments, as of railroad tracks or endless fortifi- 
cations ; huge, quaint hills, suddenly rising from 
the plain, bearing fantastic shapes ; great square 
mounds of rock and earth, haK-formed, half-broken 
pyramids, — it would seem as if a generation of 
giants had built and buried here, and left their 
work to awe and humble a puny succession. The 
Black, the Pilot, and the Church Buttes are among 
the more celebrated of these huge monumental 
mountains standing on the level plain ; but the 
railway track passes out of sight of them, all ex- 
cept the Church Butte, which, seen under favorable 
lights, imposes on the imagination like a grand old 
cathedral going into decay, quaint in its crumbling 
ornaments, majestic in its height and breadth. They 
seem, like the more numerous and fantastic illus- 
trations of Nature's frolicsome art in Southern Colo- 
rado, to be the remains of granite hills that wind 
and water, and especially the sand whirlpools which 
march in lordly force through the air, — literally 
moving mountains, — have left to hint the past, 



THE MOUNTAINS AND THE MOEMONS. 47 

and tell the story of their own achievements. Not 
unfitly, there as here, they have won the title of 
*" Monuments to the Gods." 

Passing the waters that flow south to the Colo- 
rado, we come to those that run west to the Salt 
Lake Basin. ISTature now deserts us as a railroad 
engineer ; and high art and mighty labor are sum- 
moned to make a path for the track through and 
down these western ranges of the Rocky Mountains. 
Over and down the high hills, the road at last 
reaches Echo Canyon, and, following that to its 
entrance into Weber Canyon, proceeds by this into 
the Yalley of the Salt Lake. These canyons are 
narrow and rugged, with high, perpendicular walls 
of red rock, with picturesque openings and fresh 
running streams, with little Mormon farms, and 
every element of agreeable and inspiring scenery. 
The mountain-tops are white with snow ; the 
valleys are green with grass or gay with flowers; 
and those greatly cherished but long-missed com- 
panions of man, the trees, now come in to freshen 



48 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

and familiarize tlie scene. WitHn this region we 
meet, moving west, the first tunnels of the road ; 
and there are five of them, aggregating nearly two 
thousand feet, between Green Eiver and the Salt 
Lake Valley. 

Our travellers across the continent, men or wo- 
men, will not need urging to stop at Salt Lake City, 
though it lies forty miles south of Ogden, where 
the Pacific Eailroad enters and crosses the Salt 
Lake Valley. The social and the natural pheno- 
mena centring there make it perhaps the most 
interesting feature in our journey. The courage 
of men who undertake the management of num- 
berless wives will attract one sex, while the auda- 
city of the act will arouse the wonder, if not the 
worship, of the other. Here, too, are study for the 
statesman, thought for the philosopher, and puzzles 
for the scientific student. But the science of Salt 
Lake City, social and natural, presents problems not 
easily solved ; and one must be content to look 
upon the surface of things, and move on. There 



THE MOUNTAINS AND THE MOEMONS. 49 

will be, this summer, a brancli railroad to the city, 
and sooner or later the track will proceed on south 
throuo-h the lower Mormon settlements to Arizona. 

The town will delight us with its location, on a 
high plain over the broad vaUey of the Jordan, 
Camp Douglgss behind on a higher bench of land, 
the Wahsatch Mountains, with winter caps, hanging 
above it on the north and east, while opposite lower 
mountains make a western horizon, and Salt Lake, 
an inland ocean, ripples and shimmers under the 
noonday sun, fifteen miles away. Broad streets, 
with the irrigating brooks pouring down their gut- 
ters ; good hotels ; large and well-supplied stores ; 
an abundant market ; a large and weU-appointed 
theatre, run in the name and for the benefit of the 
Church; gardens luxurious with fruit, the peach 
and the strawberry most abounding, and bountiful 
with vegetables ; hot sulphur springs in the suburbs, 
inviting most luxurious baths ; summer days, dry 
and pure, yet cool nights, — aU these wiU seduce the 
senses and minister to our joy, and the traveller 

4 



50 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

may well sing with Bishop Heber that " every pros- 
pect pleases, and only man is vile." A drive out to 
Salt Lake, and a bath and a sail, if they are to be 
had, guarding the mouth and eyes from the water, 
which is sharply salt, and the stomach from sea- 
sickness, for the wind makes short waves on this 
sea ; an attendance, if it is Sunday, — and we should 
manage to have our visit cover a Sabbath, — upon 
the services in the grand Church Square, where we 
shall see the old and new tabernacles, and the foun- 
dations of the grand Mormon cathedral, as well as 
an audience of several thousand Mormons, affording 
an interesting human study ; a walk under the high 
wall around Brigham Young's equally grand square 
opposite, with tithing-house, home for thirty wives 
and seventy children, private school-house for the 
family, all the central business ofiices of church and 
state, stables and warehouses to match so mammoth 
an establishment, and gardens of grapes and peaches 
and pears and flowers and vegetables, all within the 
area, — counting up, as we walk, the contending 



THE MOUNTAINS AND THE MORMONS. 51 

passions and conflicting experiences, the crushed 
loves and the subdued hates, the moral murders 
perpetrated, the physical murders planned, enfold- 
ed in this ten-acre circuit of wall; an excursion 
back to the mouth of the canyon that overlooks 
city and valley ; a numbering of the front-doors of 
the long, low adobe cottages, as the simplest means 
of learning how many wives each owner has, and 
wondering if haK of these children, that swarm in 
every door-yard, and play around every mud-puddle, 
have any idea who their fathers are, — these em- 
brace all that such passing travellers can hope or 
need to see and experience of Utah and the Mor- 
mons ; and for these from two to four days will 
suffice. 

We shall busy ourselves, of course, with a dozen 
questions and a dozen theories about Mormonism, 
about polygamy and Brigham Young, and when and 
how they are all coming to an end ; perhaps, if we 
hear earnest Mormons talk, we shall wonder in our 
hearts if it is possible they are right, and this little 



52 THE PACIFIC KAILEOAD — OPEN. 

leaven in Utah is, as they say, bound to leaven the 
whole American lump, and polygamy become the 
law of the sexes, and Mormonism the religion of the 
future, — which is all well enough if we keep our 
wondering doubts to ourselves. We may know, if 
we observe closely and think intelligently, that no 
social, political, and religious organization, all bound 
into one and proceeding from a common head, so 
foreign to all our principles of life and growth, as 
this of Brigham Young in Utah, exists elsewhere in 
America, nor even in Europe, indeed ; and it will 
take but little knowledge of history and its philos- 
ophy, and less of the American instinct of life and 
of man's progress, to convince us that it must give 
way, and be swept almost into forgetfulness by the 
advancing tide of American emigration and Amer- 
ican civilization. There is nothing in our American 
fundamentals that is not outraged in the theories 
and practice of the autocracy that rules here in 
Utah ; and unless we are going speedily back to the 
civilization of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this thing 



THE MOUNTAINS AND THE MORMONS. 53 

will not be, cannot be. And yet a beautiful and 
prosperous city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, 
and a surrounding territory of near one hundred 
thousand, making a garden here in the dry desert 
of this central basin of the continent, will impress 
us wonderfully, as it ought, with the power of a 
religious fanaticism, directed by a lordly will, and 
organizing a faithful, simple industry, to create 
wealth, and to set in motion many of the elements 
of progress and civilization. But for the pioneer- 
ship of the Mormons, discovering the pathway, and 
feeding those who came out upon it, all this central 
region of our great West would be now many years 
behind its present development, and the railroad, 
instead of being finished, would hardly be begun. 



V. 

FROM SALT LAKE TO THE PACIFIC. 

"^ I ^HERE is no end to the anomalies of nature in 
this great interior American basin, of whicli 
the Salt Lake VaUey is alike the threshold, the gem, 
and a sub-specimen. But the study of them is now 
accompanied with so many drawbacks that the 
pleasure-traveller will, after leaving Salt Lake City, 
seek to put the whole region between him and the 
Sierras as speedily as possible. Ascending and 
passing out of the Valley, the road skirts the 
northern shore of the lake, crossing Bear- River, 
its chief tributary, and going through the Promon- 
tory Mountains that come down from the north into 
the lake. Here the two companies building the 
railroad, from east and west, joined their tracks, 
though the point of actual connection is at Ogden, 
in the valley below ; from here the stage lines start, 



FROM SALT LAKE TO THE PACIFIC. 55 

northeast and northwest, to Montana and Idaho ; 
and from here, too, the Union or Eastern Pacific 
company intends to stretch a branch road np to 
and along the Snake branch of the Columbia Eiver, 
through Idaho, and down the Columbia to the sea, 
thus making for itself a distinct connection with the 
Pacific Ocean. The distance is six hundred and 
fifty miles, but for half of it steamboats can run 
on the rivers, so that the first construction, to 
insure steam communication, is comparatively not 
large, and will hardly require more money than 
the profits of the company in building the main 
line. 

Stretching out from Salt Lake through high 
broad valleys or plains, barren and forbidding, 
the road seeks the Humboldt Valley, and follows 
that river for two hundred and thirty miles. This 
is the old emigrant route across the continent, 
cheerless and dreary enough, indeed, but far more 
tolerable than the old stage-road, which led us 
south of Salt Lake, and crossed ItTevada at about 



56 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

its centre. The river is sluggisli and muddy, 
and fertilizes but a narrow strip of land in its 
path ; it lies along a trough between high vol- 
canic table-lands on the north, and the ranges of 
mountains that every fifteen or twenty miles lead 
off south through IsTevada, and out of whose snows 
it gathers its feeble waters. Where the road enters 
the valley wide and watery meadows spread out 
a sickly oasis, and where it leaves it the same 
phenomenon is repeated ; for the rest, there is little 
to divert the traveller, nothing to inspire him but 
the dry, clear air, and the rounded outlines of the 
bare hills. Elko, where the main tributary of the 
Humboldt comes out of the snow-capped East 
Humboldt mountains, which are ten thousand to 
twelve thousand feet high, and the backbone of 
the great basin, is the point of departure for the 
new silver-mines of White Pine, the latest sen- 
sation of the sensation-loviQg Pacific coast. They 
lie one hundred and forty miles south of the rail- 
road, in Southeastern Nevada, and if they hold 



FROM SALT LAKE TO THE PACIFIC. 57 

out as they have begun, with a pretty sure prom- 
ise of five millions the first year, they will force 
the first southern cross railroad to the Colorado, 
and checkmate Mormonism in the south. 

A little farther out we touch a bit of emigrant 
sentiment in Maggie Creek from the north, so 
named for a pretty little Scotch girl, pet of .one 
of the early columns of the army of civilization 
crossing this way years ago. Here is Carlin, a 
town of hopes, as marking a point of departure 
from the West for Idaho. J^ear here, too, if the 
locomotive breaks down, the traveller may refresh 
himself by climbing a little knob, a few rods from 
the road, and find that nature has improved an 
old crater by turning it into a mammoth hot sul- 
phur bath-tub. At Argenta he will be invited 
to a stage ride of ninety miles up the Eeese Eiver 
" valley to Austin ; but if he has ever invested in 
any of its mines, he will decline with a shudder, 
and set his face resolutely west. The glory of 
Austin is a trifle dimmed now; but it has had 



5S THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD — OPEN. 

its five or six thousand inliabitants, and was the 
successor of " Washoe/' and the forerunner of White 
Pine, in the series of mining movements that have 
made Nevada, and even threaten to perpetuate her 
existence as a State against every other Divine gift 
and grace. 

If we are hent on novelty, eighteen miles farther 
west we shall switch off our car for half a day, 
and borrow horses and gallop away south, among 
the barren hills and more barren valleys, into the 
Whirlwind Valley, where sulphurous waters beat 
and bubble beneath the surface, like numerous 
struggling hidden pumps or steam-engines, and 
occasionally burst out in columns of burning 
water and clouds of hot steam. Great, stiU. pools 
invite to a bath, yet mayhap would overtake the 
bather with a scalding, crystallizing explosion, and 
leave him a monumental statue of his temerity, 
and a new wonder of Nature in the Great Basin. 
Frequently she revenges herself here for her stint 
in all the ordinary natural graces by these deposits 



FEOM SALT LAKE TO THE PACIFIC. 59 

of seething chemicals, that seem to be faint breath- 
ings of dying volcanoes, or the early efforts of new 

ones. 

Passing between the Trinity Mountains on the 
north and the West Humboldt on the south, and 
through a mining district of great hopes, large pros- 
pecting, and small returns, the road now leaves the 
Humboldt Eiver, which sneaks off among the hills 
to die in the sands, and, crossing the Truckee Des- 
ert, forty miles of_ the dreariest country it has 
yet passed, — arid, alkalish, and Arabic, the only 
life, lizards and jackass rabbits, the only landscape 
feature, dry, brown, and bare mountains, the 
only hope, the end, — the track brings us within 
the waters and the winds of the California moun- 
tains. 

Along the Truckee to Eeno, we should there take 
a day to see Yirginia City and Gold Hill, fourteen 
miles away on a branch road. The great Comstock 
lode lies under these two towns; they are built 
along the mountain-side, upon the crust of the 



60 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

great silver-mine of America, with open depths be- 
neath of from five hundred to one thousand feet, 
and more miles of streets below than above; and 
they are the theatre of the most systematic and ex- 
tensive if not the most successful mining operations 
in this country. The mines in this lode have 
yielded over eighty millions in gold and silver 
since 1860, reaching sixteen millions, or their high- 
est year's return, in 1867, but faUing off one haK in 
1868, and giving signs now of being nearly worked 
out. It is in the hope of their renewal, at least of 
a more profitable working, that Congress is besought 
to give millions for a tunnel from far down the val- 
ley in under the mountain to the lode at a point 
below its present excavations. But with any real 
faith in the future possibilities of the mine, the 
money for the work can be raised in California and 
Nevada easier than it can be bored and bought 
through Congress. The question at issue is one of 
life or death to these towns ; but they are well 
worth even the hurried traveller's visit, as weU for 



FEOM SALT LAKE TO THE PACIFIC. 61 

their historical relations to silver-mining, to the 
settlement and organization of Nevada, and to the 
Pacific Eailroad, as for offering the best opportunity 
for observing the processes of quartz mining and 
milling, and not a little, indeed, for the uniqueness 
of their location and the surrounding natural ob- 
jects of interest. 

The " Steamboat Springs " in the neighborhood 
repeat the phenomena of Whirlwind Valley. Car- 
son, the capital, lies pleasantly in an adjoining val- 
ley nearer the great mountains ; but the mountains 
themselves now invite us more strongly, and we 
are soon moving swiftly among their gurgling waters 
and soughing pines, — rarer water and grander forest 
than we have seen before, — with towering walls of 
rock and distant snow-fields, that are full of Alpine 
memories. The snow-sheds over -the track shut out 
the best of the mountain scenery, and we must stop 
near the summit of Donner Lake, a beautiful sheet 
of water, already a favorite summer resort for Cali- 
fornia, and type of a series of grand lakes along the 



62 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

upper Sierras, that add a rare charm to their many 
other scenic attractions. A day or two here will 
make us familiar with the numerous beauties of 
this mountain range, the grand forests, the castel- 
lated rocks, the wedded summer and winter, the 
dry, pure air, the mosses, the flowers and moun- 
tain fruits, and refresh us for the descent into 
the hot suns and the brown valleys of California's 
summer. 

The railroad passage over these mountains is the 
greatest triumph of engineering skill and labor on 
the whole line. The track going west ascends 
twenty-five hundred feet in fifty miles, and descends 
six thousand feet in seventy-five miles. There are 
over a mile of tunnels on the route, and a million 
of dollars were spent in blasting-powder alone for 
the construction.. Majestic, frowning peaks hang 
over us, deep, almost fathomless gorges lie beneath 
us, as we follow out and around the long ridges in 
the descent into California ; and amid scenes more 
bold and impressive than any we have yet passed 



FROM SALT LAKE TO THE PACIFIC. 63 

through, we pass out into the lower valleys, and 
reach California's capital, Sacramento. 

Three lines invite us thence to San Francisco : 
the river-boats ; a short-cut railroad to Vallejo at 
the head of the bay, with a twenty-mile ferriage ; or 
the Pacific Eailroad's proper prolongation around 
through Stockton to Oakland, the rural suburb 
and school-house of San Francisco, lying opposite, 
and an hour's steamboat ride away, on the bay. 
By and by rails will circuit the bay, and we may 
go into the heart of San Francisco without " break- 
ing bulk " or touching water. Sacramento, Stock- 
ton, and Oakland are all worth a passing glance. 
They are inland rural cities, like Cleveland and 
Columbus in Ohio, or Hartford, Springfield, and 
Worcester in E"ew England, pleasantly located by 
the water, brisk with local trade and developing 
manufactures, mature in social and religious ele- 
ments, rich in many beautiful homes ; they rank 
next to San Francisco among the towns of Califor- 
nia. Sacramento and Stockton stand respectively at 



64 THE PACIFIC EAILROAD — OPEN. 

the heads of the Sacramento and San Joaquin val- 
leys, which form, north and south, the great interior 
basin and agricultural region of the State, and whose 
waters uniting pour westward and circle San Fran- 
cisco with her wealth of bay. 



YI. 

SAN FRANCISCO. 

"O UT it is at San Francisco that we shall linger 
and take in the essence of California life, and 
cast the future of California's wealth. First we 
shall go to the Occidental, Cosmopolitan, Euss, or 
Lick Hotels, and live at three dollars a day, — spe- 
cie, mind you, now, — as weU as at the Tremont or 
Fifth Avenue. Perhaps we shall have a mind to 
try that " peculiar institution " of the city, the 
" What Cheer House," where meals and lodgings 
are fifty cents each, with a library and natural his- 
tory and mineralogical museums thrown in ; we 
shall certainly want to test the French restaurants, 
where, at sharp six and a private table, we may 
have for a dollar and a half as good a dinner of 
four or five courses, wine included, as Parker or 
Delmonico wiU give us for a five-dollar bill. 

5 



66 THE PACIFIC KAILEOAD — OPEN. 

The fruit surprise will have been broken to us as 
we came down from the mountains ; but still the 
wonder grows at the sight of the city fruit-stands, — 
Sweetwater and Black Hamburg and Muscat grapes 
at from five to twelve cents a pound, and poorer 
qualities at haK the price ; strawberries the season 
through ; peaches and pears, more fair and luscious 
and large than our senses were ever accustomed to ; 
fresh figs, oranges, limes, and bananas, — all at 
moderate prices, and all in such abundance on the 
hotel tables and in the streets as to make a fruit- 
famished New-Englander rub his eyes and prick his 
flesh lest he be in a fairy-land dream. Then the 
more substantial articles of food: here is flour at 
half Atlantic prices, and vegetables of every kind, 
spring, summer, and fall varieties, all at once in 
fullest perfection; here are fresh salmon twelve 
months in the year, at from ten to twenty cents a 
pound, and smelts at eight cents, and fresh cod, 
bass, shrimps, anchovies, soles, even herrings, every 
treasure of the sea; and game as various, and at 



SAN FEANCISCO. 67 

prices that in many instances shame our Eastern 
markets. The materials for living are in as rich 
supply here as the art of their preparation is per- 
fect, and it will not take the thrifty mind long to 
calculate that, so far as food is concerned, a family 
can be supported more cheaply in San Francisco 
than in New York or Boston. The rates quoted 
are, of course, specie ; but wages and profits are 
also in specie, and are higher, generally, than 
currency wages and profits in Eastern cities. 

The summer, we must remember, is apt to be 
chillier than the winter in San Erancisco ; and 
though the morning sun may seduce us, it will 
never do to venture out for the day in shoes and 
white stockings or without overcoats. Montgomery 
Street is Wall Street and Broadway united, and at 
all hours of the day is full of business life and fash- 
ionable gayety, — the promenade of richly dressed 
women, the busy arena of " cornering " and " cor- 
nered " men. To the right, chiefly on made land, flat 
and regular, lie the heavy business squares of the 



68 THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD — OPEN. 

city ; to the left we mount, through, retail shops to 
homes, with weary legs and bended backs, the great 
sand-hills that are such a blessing to street contrac- 
tors, such a trial to land-owners and tax-payers, yet 
for us such a grand point of view over city and sur- 
roundings, over the wide range of interior waters 
that gather here from all the State, and, with delay- 
ing, lingering movement, circle the city as with a 
sea, and then reluctantly and yet with majestic 
sweep pass through the line of rocks by the Golden 
Gate into the Ocean. We must be sure and get this 
grand view of city and bay from several points ; 
it is a revelation in itself of the future Pacific Coast 
Empire, certainly of San Francisco's security as its 
metropolis. 

The San Franciscans, having begun wrongly on 
the American straight line and square system of 
laying out the city, are tugging away at these hills 
with tireless energy, to reduce the streets to a grade 
that man and horse can ascend and descend without 
double collar and breecliing help ; but there is work 



SAN FEANCISCO. 69 

in it for many a generation to come. They would 
have done better in accepting the situation at the 
first, chosen N'ature engineer and architect in chief, 
and circled the hiUs with their streets and build-' 
ings, instead of undertaking to go up and then 
through them. Such a flank attack would have 
been much more successful and economical and 
given them a vastly more picturesque city. 

In town, the buildings of the Mercantile and 
Young Men's Christian Associations, and of the 
California Bank, the financial king of the coast, 
will attract us ; the school-houses and churches will 
show that E'ew England has been aggressive here 
for years ; the machine-shops and woollen-mills will 
suggest that we talk lower of Lowell and Holyoke 
and Pittsburg ; and the stores and shops and little 
factories of all sorts, springing into success all about 
our wandering paths in city and suburbs, will prove 
to us that here are a people not only capable of 
going alone, but already doing so. San Francisco is 
only twenty years old, yet she has one hundred and 



70 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

fifty thousand inhabitants, a third of th^ population 
of the whole State ; her manufactures aggregate 
thirty millions a year, which exceeds the gold and 
silver products of the State, and equals the wheat 
crop ; her commerce employs from forty to fifty 
steamships and three thousand sailing vessels ; and, 
already the third, she will soon be the second com- 
mercial city of the nation. It is not best to burden 
our soul with many statistics ; but if we expect to 
get along without either a quarrel with or the con- 
tempt of our California friends, we must show that 
we know on what this Csesar of cities is feeding, and 
how fat she is sure to be. They talk lovingly as 
well as grandly of " Frisco " out here, and they only 
allow New York to be ranked as a rival when they 
are in their most condescending moods. Boston is 
where Starr King came from, and that is glory 
enough for her, and she ought to be forever grate- 
ful to California for giving him fit field for his 
powers, and so renown to his birthplace. 

In the clear, quiet morning, before the wiad 



SAN FRANCISCO. 71 

sucks in over these sand-hills through the Golden 
Gate, and the coarse dust bhnds and stings, we 
win drive out to the ocean at the CM House. 
It is an hour's ride, and the road is smooth and 
hard. We might weU stop for an hour at Lone 
Mountain Cemetery, and see how San Francisco 
is making a iit burial-place, under adverse cir- 
cumstances, and pays tribute to the memory of 
Broderick and James King of William, proud 
martyrs to the political and social reformation 
of the town and State. On the rocks before the 
Cliff House,— where we shaU take our second 
breakfast or lunch, — an army of huge seals creep 
up to sun themselves and bark, and great, gawky 
pelicans flap about; and, getting down under the 
bank, we lie on the hard sands, and try to realize 
that this is the Pacific Ocean, and that beyond 
He the Sandwich Islands and China and Japan. 
Driving back along the hard beach for miles, 
our horses trotting to the roU of the ocean, we 
attack the city from another quarter, see its proud 



72 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

Orphan Asylum, its old Mission grounds, and 
appreciate how much room for growth these wide- 
rolling sand-hills afford. 

The ever-present Chinese will pique our curi- 
osity. We must look into their homes, compact, 
simple, yet not over clean or sweet-smelling quar- 
ters, into their restaurants, and their theatre, if it 
is open, and into their "Josh Houses." Their 
stores invite us with open doors, and tempt our 
pockets with all the various specialties of Chinese 
manufacture at reasonable prices. The few are 
men of stature and presence, with faces of refine- 
ment and gentle strength; the many go sneaking 
about their work, a low type of man, physically and 
mentally, that are imported here like merchandise, 
and let out to labor under a system only half re- 
moved from slavery itself. But they are an impor- 
tant element in the industry and progress of all 
this side of the continent. Except for their labor, 
the Pacific Eailroad would have been at least two 
years longer in building. Twelve thousand of 



SAN FRANCISCO. 73 

them have done nearly all the picking and drill- 
ing and shovelling and wheeling of the road from 
Sacramento to Salt Lake. They furnish the prin- 
cipal labor in the factories ; they make cigars ; they 
dig and work over neglected gold-gulches ; they 
are cooks ; they count the specie in the banks ; 
they almost monopolize the clothes washing and 
ironing ; in all the lighter and simpler departments 
of labor, where fidelity to a pattern, and not flexi- 
bility and originality of action are required, they 
make the best and most reliable of workers. At 
least seventy-five thousand of them are scattered 
over these Pacific States west of Utah ; and though 
our American and European laborers quarrel with 
and abuse them ; though the law gives them no 
rights but that of suffering punishment ; though 
they bring no families, and seek no citizenship; 
though all the Chinese women here are not only 
commercial, but expressly imported as such ; though 
they are mean and contemptible in their vices as 
in their manners; though they are despised and 



74 THE PACIFIC EAILROAD — OPEN. 

kicked about on every hand, — still they come and 
thrive, slowly better their physical and moral and 
mental conditions, and supply this country with the 
greatest necessity for its growth and prosperity, — 
cheap labor. What we shaU do with them is not 
quite clear yet ; how they are to rank — socially, 
civiUy, and politically — among us, is one of the 
nuts for our social science students to crack, — if 
they can ; but now that we have depopulated Ire- 
land, and Germany is holding on to its own, and so 
the old sources of our labor supply are drying up, 
all America needs them, and, obeying the great nat- 
ural law of demand and supply, Asia seems almost 
certain to pour upon and over us countless thou- 
sands of her superfluous, cheap-living, slow-chang- 
ing, unassimilating, but very useful laborers. And 
we shall welcome, and then quarrel over and with 
them, as we have done with their Irish predecessors. 
Our vast grain, cotton, and fruit fields ; our extend- 
ing system of public works ; our multiplying sys- 
tem of manufactures, all need and can employ 



SAN FRANCISCO. 75 

tliem. But must they vote, and if so, to wliat 
effect? 

The garden-yards of San Francisco homes, as of 
other California towns, welcomed us lovingly, and 
will bid us a sweet adieu. Great open conserva- 
tories, with daily artificial waterings in summer, 
they maintain freshness of color and vigor of bloom 
the whole year through. Eoses of every name and 
variety, never dying and never resting ; heliotropes 
and fuchsias climbing over fences and houses, — 
in fact, all our New England June to October 
blooms make perpetual summer gayety of color 
and gratefulness of odor, at little outlay of means, 
around every individual house. The climate of 
the city is more even than of the country, — never 
so warm, never so cold ; not soft or kind to invalids, 
but a tonic and a preservative for the well, and 
keeping labor up to its fullest capacity for the 
whole twelvemonth. 

Let us look into Wells, Fargo, & Co.'s express on 
Montgomery Street, before we leave San Francisco, 



76 THE PACIFIC KAILROAD — OPEN. 

for an illustration of how much more tlioroughly 
these new people on the Pacific coast meet the 
exacting wants of our civilization than either 
Europe or the Eastern States. Here, for ten cents 
(three to the Government for the permission and 
seven for the work), your letter is taken and carried 
anywhere on the broad continent, delivered, if its 
direction bears a local habitation and a name, and 
mailed in the nearest post-offi.ce, if it has not ; here 
you can ship merchandise, small or great, to any 
known spot on the globe's surface ; here you can 
buy gold or greenbacks ; here draw on your Eastern 
correspondents, and receive the cash down ; here 
they will bargain to carry anything for you any- 
where, yourself included ; to bring you anything, 
send for anything, sell you anything, supply you 
with information on any given topic ; and generally 
set you up in knowledge, money, business, and char- 
acter. Our Eastern express companies never began 
to make themselves half so useful or omnipresent. 
San Francisco will impress all her visitors deeply 



SAN FKANCISCO. 77 

in many ways. We see it is very new ; yet we see 
it is very old. Civilization is better organized here 
in some respects than in any other city except 
Paris ; some of its streets look as if transplanted 
from a city of Europe ; others are in the first stages 
of rescue from the barbaric desert. Asia, Europe, 
and America have here met and embraced each 
other ; yet the mark of America is over and upon 
all ; an America in which the flavor of 'New Eng- 
land can be tasted above all other local elements ; 
an America in which the flexibility, the adapt- 
ability, and the all-penetrating, all-subduing power 
of its own race are everywhere and in everything 
manifest. 



VII. 

CALIFOKNIA AT LARGE. 

/^UTSIDE of San Francisco California has 
many a choice wonder in nature, many a 
rare development of industry to show its visitors. 
But summer tourists may be choice in their selec- 
tions. A few days for railroad excursions into the 
valleys of the coast mountains about San Francisco 
will show us some of the grand wheat-fields, the 
orchards, and the vineyards; will exhibit the ad- 
vantages of an agriculture that can begin ploughing 
and planting in December, keep them up till April, 
and then begin to harvest, and keep at that till 
October, with no barns necessary for housing ani- 
mals or crops; will open to us beautiful natural 
groves of oaks; will reveal to us charming little 
nooks of rural homes among the adjoining hills ; 
will invite us to health-giving sulphur-baths and 



CALIFORNIA AT LARGE. 79 

soda-springs more deliglitfully located than Sharon 
or Saratoga ; will give us a peep into the gardens 
of the old Catholic missionaries among the Indians, 
now overgrown with peach, plum, and fig trees, 
where we may have the novelty of picking the ripe 
figs from trees nearly as large as the big elms on 
Boston Common; will — if we go far enough — a 
two days' ride — take us into the wild valley of the 
Geysers, where a miniature hell sends up its sul- 
phurous waters, and burns and poisons all the earth 
and air within its reach, and where you peer into 
each crevice and around every corner in sure faith 
of seeing the Monster of Evil switching his tail 
in vengeful activity ; again will carry us into the 
grand forests of redwood in the coast mountains, — 
sponsor and promise of the mammoth trees of the 
Sierras, — a light, delicate, reddish cedar that enters 
largely into the lumber supply of the San Francisco 
market; will introduce our curious steps to the 
great quicksilver mine of New Almaden, the rival 
of the Almaden mine of Spain ; or will set us down 



80 THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD — OPEN. 

under the mountains by tlie ocean's shore at Santa 
Cruz, the Mce of our Pacific coast, where the pure 
air breathes soft and low, and invalids rejoice in 
relief. Farther down, Los Angelos invites us, with 
stories of the tropical wealth of Southern California, 
of grape-vines as trees, of orange and olive, of lemon 
and banana groves, of cotton plantations, of agricul- 
tural wealth unbounded, of a climate so dry and 
even, so soft and sweet, as to surpass Italy's. 

But most of us will wait for the Southern Pacific 
Eailroad, already moving out from both sides, to in- 
troduce us to this latter region of almost fabulous 
wealth and beauty ; and, after a hasty run, with 
wide-open eyes, into Kapa, Sonoma, and Santa 
Clara valleys, perhaps into that of Eussian Eiver, 
we shall prepare for the one great wonder which 
we came out to see, — the Yosemite Valley. Por 
this, ten days, a full purse, and Professor Whitney's 
new and model guide-book and maps, one of the 
best incidental gifts of the geological survey of the 
•State, — these and a camping suit, with duster and 



CALIFORNIA AT LARGE. 81 

overcoat, are essential. The best way to go is by 
niglit boat or early morning cars to^ Stockton ; and 
then by stage one hundred miles up the San Joaquin 
valley, — how dry and dusty ! — through rich 
wheat-fieldSj into and through, too, that magnificent 
ruin, that football of Wall Street, Fremont's Mari- 
posa estate. In one of the dying villages of this 
principality. Bear Yalley or Mariposa, saddle-horses 
and guides are procured. If possible, add tents, 
blankets, and food, and travel independent of 
ranches or hotels. The first day, after leaving the 
stage, and going up into the mountains, we shall 
reach White and Hatch's for dinner, to which point 
we may, if we choose, ride in wagons, and get to 
Clark's ranch for supper. Here we shall wish, of 
course, to stop over for a day, to see the Big Trees 
of the Mariposa Grove. These are four or five 
miles' distance from Clark's, and, if possible, we per- 
suade him to- go with us. He is the State's agent 
for the care of the Yosemite Valley and the Grove, 
and a genuine child of the great nature around him ; 

6 



82 THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD — OPEN. 

and whether within his wide-spreading cabins, or 
under his protecting haystack, or in your own 
tent by the side of his grand open-air fires, he 
will care for us as father for children, and be proud 
to have us praise his trees, his river, and his 
mountains. 

Another day — the fourth — takes us into the 
grand Yalley, after a hundred miles of wagon and 
forty of saddle riding from Stockton; every man 
and woman of us making sure to dwell long upon 
the first views that are opened to us as we come out 
of the woods, and look over into the depths below, 
and on to the heights above and beyond. Only 
seeing is believing what this gorge in the mountains 
reveals. It is Nature speaking to man in a way 
that proves and exalts her supremacy. There are 
simple hotels here ; but if we have tents and blan- 
kets, we should pass each of our three days and 
nights at different points in the Valley, one in the 
lower part, under El Capitan, another where the 
music of the Yosemite Fall will lull us to sleep, and 



CALIFOENIA AT LARGE. 83 

the third by the lake, or in the neighborhood of the 
Vernal Fall. All the main features of interest are 
within a ten-mile line, and the three days will give 
us ample time to see them comfortably. But these 
will hold not an hour too much ; and no week in 
any life could be more memorable than the one that 
should be spent under the rocks and by the side of 
the waters of the Yosemite. 

Another week «aay be also profitably spent by 
the lover of rare and majestic nature among the 
High Sierras circling the Yosemite Valley. Here, 
upon and among mountains from eight thousand to 
thirteen thousand feet high, we find beautiful lakes 
and bright rivers, grand rock and mountain scen- 
ery, and a repetition in miniature of the Yosemite 
Valley itself, called the Hetch-Hetchy Valley ; and 
if we choose to prolong our ride down the N"evada 
side of the mountains to Mono Lake, we shall dis- 
cover in that sheet of water, fourteen miles long 
by nine wide, truly a Sea of Death. IsTo living 
thing can exist in it; its waters will consume 



84 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

leather, and thoroughly decompose the human body 
in a few weeks ; and though it receives various pure 
streams from out the mountains^ it poisons all from 
its fountains of death, and, like Salt Lake, has no 
apparent outlet, and is even more of a puzzle to 
geologists and chemists than that better known in- 
land sea. 

The return trip from the Yosemite should be 
made by the Coulterville trail and road, keeping 
our original outfit with us. There are ten miles 
more of horseback riding on this route ; but it in- 
troduces us to a change of scenery, and a remark- 
able cave, called Bower's Cave, and invites us by a 
short detour to visit the Calaveras Grove of Big 
Trees, the first discovered and best known of these 
forest wonders. There are some eight collections of 
these mammoth trees scattered along the Sierra 
Mountains within a distance of one hundred and 
fifty miles ; the tallest trees yet measured are fuU 
three hundred and twenty-five feet high, and are in 
the Calaveras collection ; and the largest in circum- 



CALIFORNIA AT LARGE. 85 

ference are in the Mariposa Grove, and measure over 
ninety feet ; while the greatest age that any yet 
scientifically tested in that respect can claim is 
about thirteen hundred years. Their beauty of 
shape and color is as striking as their size ; and no 
visitor to California will omit them in his tour of 
its curiosities. 

Though the mining interests of California have 
fallen behind those of agriculture and manufactures, 
and seem destined to stilL greater decay, there are 
some features of them decidedly worth a stranger's 
study. Grass Valley is the centre . of the most 
extensive successful gold quartz mining; and its 
operations are not dissimilar to those of Central City 
in Colorado and Virginia City in N"evada. But the 
disembowelling of the dead rivers of California for 
the loose deposits of gold left in their beds by the 
convulsions of nature in ages long past, the deep 
excavations, and the grand hydraulic processes re- 
sorted to for the purpose of reaching them, develop 
both natural phenomena and great ingenuity and 



86 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

boldness in man, that rank among the curiosities of 
the State. These dead rivers are not dry, open beds ; 
but huge strata of sand, gravel, and quartz, filling 
up what were once river channels, and lying now 
from a hundred to a thousand feet beneath the foot- 
hills of the mountains. They lie parallel with the 
Sierra N'evadas, and diagonally to the rivers now 
coming out of the mountains ; thej^ were sponged 
up and filled up by the upheaval of the hills ; and 
their place was made known by the modern streams 
cutting down through them, and revealing on the 
walls of the canyon the peculiar gold-bearing ma- 
terials that now occupy their beds. Out of these 
dead rivers three hundred millions in gold have 
been taken, and they stiU yield eight millions a 
year. Much capital and labor are requisite to carry 
on mining operations in them : tunnels are run 
along their lines, and great streams of water are 
brought down from the mountains, through miles of 
ditches and troughs, and poured, by the aid of hose, 
with many times more force than the streams from 



CALIFORNIA AT LAEGE. 87 

a steam fire-engine, upon a hillside, to tear it to 
pieces and get at the gold materials, or into the gold- 
beds themselves to wash out the precious particles. 
The ruin and waste that such operations spread 
around are frightful ; rivers are choked up with the 
sands and stones sent down by these washings ; and 
broad valleys of alluvial are made a desert by the 
overspreading tide of hills they set afloat. 

But it is no longer proper to consider California 
as especially a mining State. Many of the mining 
villages and camps along under the mountains have 
been wholly deserted ; nearly all are decreasing in 
population — it is very sad and very odd to see so 
new a country so soon old and decaying ; and the 
agriculture and commerce and manufactures of the 
State are each, even now, in advance of the mining 
interest in wealth and productiveness. The mining 
counties have fallen ofP twenty-five per cent in 
population since 1860, while that of the agricultural 
counties has doubled, and that of San Francisco 
trebled in the same time. The agricultural products 



88 THE PACIFIC KAILROAD — OPEN. 

of 1868 footed up sixty millions of doUars, against 
twenty-six millions in metals. There are thirty 
million grape-vines growing in the State ; and the 
wine manufactured in 1866 amounted to from three 
to four millions of gallons, and in 1868 to eight 
millions. The wine was at first crude and coarse, 
but, as the virulent richness of the soil is tempered 
by use, and greater care and science are used in the 
manufacture, its quality rapidly improves. Finer 
kinds of the grape than the old Mission are coming 
rapidly into cultivation, and will stUL more surely 
improve the quality and diversify the varieties of 
the wine. The wheat crop of California in 1868 
was fifteen millions of bushels ; the barley, eight 
millions, — this grain being fed freely to horses 
on the Pacific coast ; the wool, fifteen millions of 
pounds ; the butter, five millions, and the cheese, 
three millions, and still much butter and cheese are 
imported from the East. The exports of domestic 
produce, aside from metals, amounted to seventeen 
millions in 1868 ; the chief item being wheat, of 



CALIFORNIA AT LARGE. 89 

wHch no other State in the Union raised so large a 
surplus in that year, and, with a contribution of four 
million bushels of surplus from Oregon, California 
is holding over for higher prices, or the contingency 
of a bad year, probably close on to a two years' sup- 
ply, for her own wants. 

With such suddenly developed, yet securely held 
wealth as these few facts illustrate, the future of 
California looms before the visitor with proportions 
that astound and awe. Her nature is as boundless 
in its fecundity and variety as it is strange and 
{^artling in its forms. While Switzerland has only 
four mountains that reach as high as thirteen thou- 
sand feet, California has one or two hundred, and 
one, Mount Whitney, that soars to fifteen thousand 
feet, and is the highest peak of the Eepublic. She 
has a waterfall fifteen times as high as Niagara. 
All climates are her own ; any variety which her 
long stretch north and south does not present, her 
mountains and valleys introduce. Dead volcanoes 
and sunken rivers abound in her mountains ; the 



90 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

largest animal of the continent makes his covert 
in her chaparral ; the second largest bird of the 
world floats over her plains for carrion ; the bones 
of the oldest man have been dug out of her depths ; 
the biggest nugget of gold (weighing 195 pounds 
and worth $37,400) has been found among her 
gold deposits; she has lakes of such rarity that 
a sheet of paper will sink in their waters, so vora- 
cious that they will eat up a man, boots, breeches, 
and all, in thirty days, so endowed in their foun- 
tains that they will supply the world's apothecaries 
with borax, sulphur, and soda ; she has mud vol- 
canoes and the Yosemite Valley ; she grows beets 
of 120 pounds, cabbages of 75, onions of 4, turnips 
of 26, and watermelons of 80 pounds, and has a 
grape-vine 15 inches thick, and bearing 6,500 
pounds in one season. Her men are the most en- 
terprising and audacious ; her women the most self- 
reliant and the most richly dressed ; and her chil- 
dren the stoutest, sturdiest, and the sauciest of any 
in all the known world ! Let us worship and move 
on! 



VIII. 

THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. 

'nr^O us of the East tlie Sandwich Islands are 
a remote foreign kingdom, where our whalers 
refit, and to the conversion of whose heathen we 
dedicated all the sanctified pennies of our child- 
hood. But here in California they are counted 
as neighbors, dependencies, ay, surely and soon 
possessions of the American Eepublic. We have 
converted their heathen ; we have possessed their 
sugar-plantations ; we furnish the brains that carry 
on their government, and the diseases that are de- 
stroying their natives ; we want the profit on their 
sugars and their tropical fruits and vegetables ; why 
should we not seize and annex the islands them- 
selves ? At any rate, the familiarity with which 
the Eastern visitor finds " the Islands " spoken of 
in California, the accounts he receives of their 



92 THE PACIFIC KAILEOAD — OPEN. 

strange scenery, their wonderful volcanoes, their 
delightful climate, — all "will strongly invite him. 
to make them a visit. Indeed, though his portfolio 
may contain choicest specimens of coloring and of 
contour, . — new harmonies of tint, new measures of 
grandeur, fresh surprises of form, — gathered in so- 
journings among the mountains and parks of Col- 
orada, or in the deep canyons of the Sierra, yet he 
must not close it feeling that he has exhausted the 
revelations that this Western World has to make to 
him, until he has added a few sketches at least of 
the yet more unique scenery of the Hawaiian Isl- 
ands. So, if time permits, let us see the utmost 
possibilities and varieties of the Republic, and de- 
vote to these at least a couple of months. 

This little group of breezy, sunny islands, stand- 
ing like an outpost of the great army of islands, 
little and big, that guard the eastern coast of Asia, 
yet offering itself as a kind of neutral ground on 
which the Eastern and Western Worlds have met 
and joined hands, lies about two thousand miles 



THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. 93 

southwest of San Francisco, and is broiiglit into 
close communication with it by means of a semi- 
monthly steamer. A voyage of ten days, — days 
of uninterrupted sunshine and serenity on this most 
smiling of seas, — and the passenger will find him- 
seK rounding the bold, bare headland of Diamond 
Point, which stands guard over the little bay and 
city of Honolulu. The first view of this miniature 
capital of a petty kingdom can hardly fail to disap- 
point us ; it is but a village of unpretending wooden 
houses, clustered for the most part around the bay, 
and stretching out, here and there, a long arm up 
into the hills toward which it slopes. But one has 
not come so many thousand miles from home to see 
a counterpart of Boston or New York, and the first 
walk on shore will offer a suggestion at least of the 
pleasure that awaits him in the thousand novel 
shapes and aspects of a changed hemisphere. After 
two or three weeks here, spent in early morning or 
evening gallops into the wonderful valleys of the 
range of hills that cut the island in two, varied with 



94 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

climbs to the different summits, from whicli, on each, 
side of yon, the little island seems to roll away and 
leap and tnmble in great billows of green into the 
sea ; and with the day rounded in on cool and fra- 
grant verandas, among these intelligent, hospitable 
people, with whom kindness to the stranger is the 
first of duties, — the visitor will find it hard to 
believe that the other islands can promise greater 
attractions. ; 

The first expedition usually made is to the active 
volcano Kilauea, situated on the Island of Hawaii, 
the easternmost of the group. Tor this the indis- 
pensable articles by way of outfit are, first, a water- 
proof (in case of a lady, a bloomer dress of heavy 
woollen material) and a saddle, as all the journeying 
must be made on horseback ; to these may be added 
whatever articles of comfort or convenience the in- 
dividual taste may suggest ; but it is desirable that 
all should not exceed the capacity of a pair of sad- 
dle-bags. To sail direct to Hilo, which is the most 
common course, instead of landing on the other side 



THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. 95 

of the island at Kawaihae, and making a partial cir- 
cuit of the island, is to rob one's seK of a rich and 
rare experience of pleasure. It is a journey of three 
or four days, and attended with some fatigue and 
discomfort, but to the enthusiastic sight-seer the 
annoyances will prove far more than overpaid by 
the pleasures. After a day of monotonous scenery, 
the road winds round the base of Mauna Kea, and 
comes out close to the sea; and then begins the 
romantic part of it, through a succession of preci- 
pices, — or great cracks, they might be called, — 
from one hundred to five hundred feet deep, and 
so steep that General Putnam's feat of riding down 
stairs seemed nothing to the perils of such a de- 
scent. But these palis, as the natives call them, 
are as beautiful as they are appalling ; their steep 
sides are covered with every shade of green, from 
the silver-leaved kukui to the dark purple fronds 
of pulu fern, — masses and tangles of vines and 
trees, and at the bottom of each a roaring, tumbling 
brook, or narrow arm of the sea. On this side of 



96 THE PACIFIC RAILEOAD — OPEN. 

the island, also, lie the rich sugar-plantations under 
whose hospitable roofs the traveller must look to 
find his shelter and his victual. 

But Hilo will not suffer him to pass her by 
without stopping to pay a tribute of admiration to 
her beautiful bay and cultivated and generous in- 
habitants, giving him at the same time the oppor- 
tunity to take breath before the last and longest 
day of his journey. Kilauea lies four thousand 
feet high on the side of the lofty Mauna Loa, and 
a gradual ascent of thirty miles lands you suddenly 
on the edge of its enormous, yawning chasm. So 
vast is it that it is impossible to get any idea of its 
gigantic proportions till you have climbed down its 
almost perpendicular walls, and traversed its ten- 
mile circuit. The condition of its activity varies 
greatly at different times ; sometimes a chain of 
fiery lakes, connected by subterraneous channels, 
hems in the molten mass ; sometimes it overleaps 
its barriers, and pours out rivers of fire over the 
floor of the crater. No words can depict the awful 



THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. " 97 

fascination of those fiery caldrons, boiling and 
hissing and roaring, and tossing up fountains of 
liquid flame. The most effective time to see them 
is at evening. Then the whole sky is lighted up 
with the reflection of the fire, and the surrounding 
darkness serves to heighten the effect of the glow- 
ing, seething mass. 

In striking contrast with Kilauea stands the stu- 
pendous extinct volcano of Haleakala, almost the 
greater wonder of the two. It occupies the eastern 
half of the Island of Maui, and is a cone of ten 
thousand feet high. Its crater is three times the 
size of Kilauea, — that is, thirty miles in circum- 
ference, — and more than a thousand feet deep. 
Parties who visit this are accustomed to take their 
camping equipage, and to pass a night on the top 
of the mountain, not only because the excursion 
would be too fatiguing for a single day, but also 
because, through the day the crater is filled with 
light clouds and mist, which only depart with the 
setting sun. No scene could possibly combine more 
7 



98 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

elements of the grand and the beautiful than this 
does ; the soft floccnlent masses of clouds silently 
rolling in and out of these Tartarean depths, 
through the great gap in the mountain-wall, toward 
the sea, occasionally breaking to reveal the fright- 
ful darkness beneath ; then, as the sun sinks, it 
touches the whole cloud-landscape with a rose- 
gray glow ; long lines of trade-wind cloudlets, like 
fleets of phantom ships, go scudding over the sea ; 
the three lofty summits of Hawaii, and the lesser 
heights of the islands surrounding Maui, repeat the 
sunset tints, and the whole, seems like a scene of 
enchantment. Maui also can boast of a valley that 
deserves to be mentioned by the side of the Yo- 
semite, though different enough in outline and in 
coloring to forbid rivalry ; and these, together with 
the most picturesque mountain group of all the 
islands, the richest sugar-plantations, and the most 
generous and free-handed proprietors, make for 
Maui the greenest spot in the memory of every 
traveller. 



THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. 99 

It is impossible, in the limits of such, a brief 
sketch as this, to do more than roughly outline 
the chief points of interest of these far-off islands. 
The climate, too, lends its subtle attraction, being 
just that delicious blending of heat and coolness 
that leaves one puzzled to know whether he is only 
comfortably warm or refreshingly cool. One who 
has two or three months of leisure cannot better 
bestow it than in going to see all this for himself ; 
and he will obtain from the warm-hearted island- 
ers every possible help and suggestion he may 
need to make his journey easy and profitable, with 
only one drawback, and that is, that at every place 
he may stop, with the exception of Honolulu, he 
must accept the freely-offered hospitality of the 
foreign residents, nor dare to make any return, 
except in friendship's coin. 



IX. 

OREGON. — PUGET'S SOUND. — THE COLUMBIA 

RIVER. 

*' I ^HE Islands, however, involve, with the rest, 
a full five or six months, and cannot be put 
into the two or three months' plan with which we 
left home. But Oregon, the Columbia Eiver, and 
Idaho can ; and if you please we will go home that 
way. It will take but two weeks longer than the 
straight railroad line back, and even the most super- 
ficial circuit of our New West will be incomplete 
without it. Good ocean steamers will carry us 
around to Portland, Oregon, from San Erancisco 
within two days ; but if the roads are tolerable and 
the stage service what it should be, we shall prefer 
to go overland. The cars take us up the grand 
valley of the Sacramento through Marysville to 
OroviUe, and leave about five hundred miles for 



OREGON. 101 

the stage. We ride then through "broad, alluvial 
meadows, golden brown with wheat, enlivened by 
a frequent old oak grove ; past Chico, where, if 
possible, we should linger to see General BidweU, 
and his twenty-thousand-acre farm, with gardens 
and orchards to correspond ; past Eed Bluffs, the 
head of navigation on the Sacramento Eiver, where 
the widow and daughters of old John Brown live in 
quiet village honor and usefulness, nursing the sick 
teaching the young ; into narrowing valleys, the 
Coast Eange and the Sierras meeting and embra- 
cing each other ; over pleasant hills with occasional 
plantations of apple, pear, and grape, growing here 
most luxuriantly ; along under the grand shadows 
of Moun?fc Shasta, monarch of the Northern Sierras, 
and the Mont Blanc of California ; over higher 
hills and into the cross valleys of Northern Cali- 
fornia and Southern Oregon, — the Trinity, Kla- 
math, Eogue, and Umpqua Eivers coursing wildly 
to the sea, — many a gem of oak grove on the 
way, the green misletoe and the gray moss pen- 



102 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

dent from the branches, and the gay madrona-tree 
lighting up the scene; many a broad intervale 
of grass and grain welcoming flocks or reapers ; 
through and in sight of forests of pines, cedars, 
spruces, balsams, birches, and ash, greener and 
more diversified than those of California, and 
grander in individual size and collective extent 
than those of the AILeghanies or the White Hills, 
— stopping in the Umpqua valley to have an 
hour's chat on the philosophy and practice of 
politics with Jesse Applegate, a wise old pioneer 
of Oregon, — finding everywhere beauty, novelty, 
and exhilaration in nature; and come out at last 
into the garden of Oregon, the Willamette vaUey. 
Never elsewhere have our eyes looked upon a scene 
of picturesque rural beauty like that spread before 
us, as the stage comes out of the hills and woods, 
and we overlook the broad meadows, with their 
wide, open groves, rising and falling in softly un- 
dulating lines, and the hills standing far apart to 
frame the picture. The parks of Old England, 



OREGON. — PUGET'S SOUND. 103 

the valleys of !N"ew England, the prairies of Illi- 
nois, the mountains of Colorado and California, 
alL seem to have contributed their special ele- 
ments, their choicest treasures, to make up this 
scene. Through this valley of the Willamette 
(or Wallomet, as some of the Oregonians insist 
on spelling the name), one hundred and twenty- 
five miles long and fifty miles wide, the railroad 
or the steamboat may quicken our speed ; but we 
shall wish to linger over its wealth of beauty 
and wealth of agriculture. Prosperous villages 
lie along the river, and sixty thousand people 
already live upon the soil. "Wheat, corn, and 
fruit are the chief products ; and there is no 
stint in the return. 

Portland lies on the Willamette, just before it 
enters the Columbia, has from eight to nine thou- 
sand inhabitants, who pay almost a l>[ew England 
respect to the Sabbath, and dreams sometimes that 
it is a rival to San Erancisco. It would be well if, 
now we are here, we could run across Washington 



104 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

Territory, — a two days' ride through thicker forests 
of larger trees even than any we have before seen, 
always excepting the grand mammoth groves of Cal- 
ifornia, — and visit that northern wealth of water, 
Puget's Sonnd. Steamboats carry ns through it to 
Victoria, on Vancouver's Island, and back, and the 
ride is a revelation of new beauties and new wealth. 
Magnificent forests line its shores ; the largest ships 
can move close to its banks ; there is lumber here 
for all nations and all time ; snow-covered moun- 
tains, grand in form, smiling in visage, rise on the 
right and left ; and we come back penetrated with 
a new wonder at the far-reaching bounty of our 
Northwest, and a trifle impatient that the British 
drum-beat is even temporarily sounded over a por- 
tion of such waters, over an acre of such excellent 
forests for ship-timber and profitable lumber gener- 
ally. A week's time would suffice to make this ex- 
cursion from Portland to Victoria and back, and 
most recompensing investment would it prove. 
But we promised to return homeward by the 



THE COLUMBIA RIVER. 105 

Columbia Eiver. Elegant steamers* convey us into 
and up its mile-and-a-lialf broad sea-sweep. Soon 
we pass Fort Vancouver, where Grant, Hooker, and 
McClellan all served apprenticeship, and Grant dis- 
tinguished himself by raising a crop of potatoes ; 
and it was while here, too, that our new President 
left the army, to come back in the hour of national 
distress, — rescued himself, rescuing us. Mount 
Hood appears next upon the scene, the pride of 
Oregon, and fit rival to California's Shasta, — in- 
deed, a grand pyramid of snow in the distance ; 
but soon now we enter the exciting theatre of con- 
flict between river and rock, that distinguishes the 
Columbia Eiver above all other known rivers, and 
endows it with a beauty and a grandeur that the 
Ehine, the Hudson, and the Northern Mississippi 
can hardly imitedly claim. Two short railroads 
of five and fourteen miles convey passengers and 
freight around rapids and rocks in the river, where 
boats cannot pass, to other boats of equal excel- 
lence above. 



X. 

IDAHO. — SHOSHONE FALLS. 

"mpAST of the mountams the close, rich forests 
disappear, the hills are bare and brown as in 
Nevada, and the boat-ride grows monotonous. At 
Umatilla or Walla- Walla, some three hundred miles 
above Portland, we come to the present head of 
navigation, and take stages for a ride of five hun- 
dred miles over the Blue Mountains, through the 
Grande Eonde valley, along the valley of the Snake 
Eiver, where steamboats can and may soon help us 
over another one hundred and fifty miles of the 
way, into and through Idaho, and on to Salt Lake 
and the railroad again. That portion of this ride 
over the Blue Mountains and through the Grande 
Eonde Yalley is most satisfactory for scenery. The 
ascent and descent of the mountains are easy, the 
roads hard and smooth, and the views, near and re- 



IDAHO. — SHOSHONE FALLS. 107 

mote, very grand and inspiring. Gorges and parks, 
forests and meadows alternate with fine panoramic 
effect ; and a bath in the warm sulphur springs by 
the roadside will relieve the weariness of the body. 
Through Idaho, whose gold-mines seem to hesitate 
in their productiveness, and whose towns are either 
fading or at a standstill, and along the Upper Snake, 
the country bears a dull, barren uniformity, and 
high volcanic table-lands begin to appear and 
absorb the landscape. 

Here, within from one hundred to one hundred 
and thirty miles of the north end of Salt Lake, 
are to be found several peculiar and grand freaks 
of Nature, which the traveller should leave the 
stage for a day or two to observe. The first, com- 
ing east, is the canyon of the Malade Eiver, a 
branch of the Snake on the north; for miles it 
flows through a narrow gorge of solid lava rock, in 
some places fifty feet deep, and yet only eight or 
ten feet across, the confined waters coursing rapidly 
and angrily along below. Next, at Snake Eiver 



108 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

Ferry, the waters of its Lost Eiver Branch, having 
sunk beneath the ground a long distance back, 
emerge to light again just at the point of junction, 
and pour over rocks one hundred and fifty feet 
hio'h into the main stream. Ten or fifteen miles 
from this point, though only seven miles from the 
stage-road at another place, are the Shoshone Falls 
in the Snake Eiver itseK. They rank next to 
Niagara in the list of the world's waterfalls, and 
by some visitors are held to be entitled to the first 
rank in majesty of movement and grandeur of sur- 
roundiQcr feature. All about is volcanic rock, — 
wide lava fields give an awful silence for this 
grand voice of Nature to speak in. The river, two 
hundred yards wide, deep and swift, has worn itself 
a channel one hundred feet down into the rock ; 
then, as if in preparation for the grand leap, it 
indulges in a series of cascades of from thirty to 
sixty feet in height, and, now gathering into an un- 
broken body, it swoops doAvn, in a grand horseshoe 
shape, twelve hundred feet across, a two hundred 



IDAHO. — SHOSHONE FALLS. 109 

and ten feet fall, into the bottomless pit below. 
The river is not so wide as Niagara, nor the volume 
of water so great, but the fall is higher, and quite 
as beautiful. It is difficult to get near to the falls, 
because of the high, rough, and perpendicular 
walls of, rock that guard the stream ; but they 
Can be reached with hard climbing both above and 
below. A perpendicular pillar of rock rises one 
hundred feet in the midst of the rapids above ; 
islands halt in the stream just over the cataract ; 
and two huge rocky columns stand on eg-ch side of 
the falls, as if to sentinel the scene, and guard it 
from sacrilegious hands. Either by a day's detour 
in the trip from the Columbia Eiver to Salt Lake, 
as we have suggested, or by a special journey of 
three or four days from the railroad at the latter 
point, these distinctive and distinguished marvels 
of nature will soon be freely visited by Pacific 
Eailroad travellers, and the details of their sublim- 
ity more thoroughly catalogued by pen and pho- 
tograph for the general public. 



XI. 

MONTANA AND HOME. 

"XT OW again at Salt Lake, — time, money, and 
disposition holding out, and the season favor- 
able, — there will, indeed, be great temptation to 
round our travel with the stage ride through Mon- 
tana to Fort Benton on the Upper Missouri, and 
follow down that river in one of its steamboats to 
Omaha again. It is about three hundred miles by 
stage to Virginia City, Montana, four hundred and 
twenty-five to Helena, and near six liundred to Fort 
Benton, and the fare through one hundred and forty 
dollars. The roads are excellent, the stage service 
the best on the continent, and the scenery across 
the high, open plains, along the fertile valleys, and 
through the favorable passes in the upper Eocky 
Mountain ranges, fresh, picturesque, and every way 
inviting. Colorado is scarcely more favorable for 



MONTANA AND HOME. Ill 

farming and stock-growing purposes than Montana. 
The ride is among the head- waters of the Missouri 
Eiver, and grand mountains follow as guides and 
guards, and yet not to obstruct, along the entire 
pathway. In Montana, too, we can see mining in 
all its phases, more readily than perhaps anywhere 
else, — by paning, " long toms," sluicing, hydraulics, 
and quartz-miUs ; each and all are in operation 
there now and near together. The boat ride down 
the Missouri will be long, slow, and tedious ; the 
stream is muddy, the banks for the most part high, 
barren, and uninviting; the time will perhaps be 
ten days or two weeks; but the experience will 
prove very instructive, and the journey will afford 
opportunity for reaping and digesting all the sum- 
mer harvest of the senses. 

Or, postponing Montana for a more convenient 
season, and indulging our unsatisfied . curiosity in 
another peep over Brigham Young's garden and 
harem wall, and our weary bodies in another bath 
in the warm pools of fresh sulphur water in the 



112 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

suburbs of Salt Lake City, we close our Pacific 
Eailroad excursion by a two days' ride in the cars, 
back over the mountains and across the plains to 
Omaha, which places us again on the threshold of 
the East and of Home. 

Over aU this country, through which we have so 
hastily travelled, the careful hand of science has 
yet but little passed. Professor Whitney has done 
much to map the past and present of California, 
and inventory its varied resources ; if sustained by 
the State, he will complete a work that will be of 
incalculable benefit to its people, and a great gift to 
the scientific knowledge of the world. Several 
young graduates of his survey, with aid from the 
general government, are fast completing a thorough 
scientific examination and report of a belt across 
the continent, along the fortieth parallel, or the 
line of the Pacific Eailroad. This will prove of 
great interest and value. Professor Powell, an en- 
thusiast in geology and natural history from Illi- 
nois, spent last summer, with a party of assistants, 



MONTANA AND HOME. 113 

in a scientific exploration of the parks and moun- 
tains of Colorado, and, after wintering in the wilds 
of Western Colorado, he proposes this season to ex- 
tend his observations into the almost unknown land 
of Southwestern Colorado and ]N"ortheastern Arizona, 
and perhaps test the safety of the passage of the 
great canyon of the Colorado of the West. Here 
lies, as yet, the grand geographical secret of our 
Western empire. For three hundred miles this 
river, which drains the western slopes of the Eocky 
Mountains for several hundred miles, is confined 
within perpendicular rock walls, averaging three 
thousand feet in height, down which there is no safe 
descent, up which there is no climbing, between 
which the stream runs furiously. One man is re- 
ported to have gone through it, and come out aKve ; 
to explore it, and report upon it, is the dangerous 
yet fascinating undertaking of Professor Powell. 
For the rest, our scientific knowledge of the moun- 
tains and plains and deserts of our far West de- 
pends upon the reports of government engineers, 



114 THE PACIFIC EAILEOAD — OPEN. 

and the railroad surveys, — valuable, indeed, but 
incomplete, and provoking rather than allaying the 
curiosity of the scholar. 

The Indians are not likely to interfere with 
Pacific Eailroad travel. The fears of travellers 
may be spared on tliat account. IlTeither among 
the parks and mountains of Colorado, nor in the 
valleys of California and Oregon, nor in the Sierra 
Nevada mountains, shall we be likely to meet 
them, save as humble, peaceful supplicants for 
food and tobacco. They may appear on the routes 
through Idaho and Montana. But greater danger 
is to be apprehended from " the road agents," or 
highway robbers. In Nevada and California, and 
in Idaho, they have occasionally introduced the 
Mexican banditti style of operating on travellers ; 
rarely killing their victims, and only making sure 
to get all their money and watches, and whatever 
treasure the express messenger on the stage may 
have in hand. This Western country is destined, 
probably, to go through an era of that sort of 



MONTANA AND HOME. 115 

crime. The vicious and vagrant populations that 
followed the progress of the railroad in its build- 
ing, and have been set loose by its completion, 
and the similar elements turned adrift by the 
failure of mining enterprises, both furnish the 
needy and desperate characters for the business. 
!N"ot unlikely they may grow bold enough to stop 
and "go through" a railroad train. Short and 
sharp should be the dealing with this class of 
marauders, when they begin their career, and then 
it will speedily close. But the chance of being 
victims of their interference with our journeyings 
is not great enough to excuse any of us in stay- 
ing at home, when such inviting pleasures and 
such wide-reaching experiences as the Pacific 
Eailroad, open, offers to us all, lay along, around, 
and beyond its track. 

These are but scant outlines of the new and 
larger half of our Eepublic. We have given lines 
where only pages could properly picture a scene, 
describe an experience, or develop a capacity. 



116 THE PACIFIC RAILROAD — OPEN. 

Arizona, 'Rew Mexico, and Lower California — 
three territories as remarkable, perhaps, in natural 
wonders and resources as any in our 'New AVest — 
have hardly been touched upon ; but only specu- 
lators or adventurers will be readily tempted into 
their difficulties and dangers now; and we fear 
the early travellers by the new pathway of iron 
will be appalled by the variety of entertainment 
to which we here invite them. But if they start 
with the protest that we have promised too much, 
they will return with the confession that the half 
was not told them. 

Whatever we go out to see, whatever pleasures 
we enjoy, whatever disappointments suffer, this, 
at least, will be our gain, — a new conception of 
the magnitude, the variety and the wealth, in 
nature and resource, in realization and in promise, 
of the American Eepublic, — a new idea of what 
it is to be an American citizen. He is past ap- 
peal and beyond inspiration who is not broad- 
ened, deepened, greatened, every way, by such ex- 



a 



MONTANA AND HOME. 117 

perience of the extent, capacity, and opportunity 
of this Nation, and who does not henceforth per- 
form his duties as its citizen with increased fidel- 
ity and a more sacred awe of his trust. 



APPENDIX. 



Outline for a Two Months' Journey to the Pacific 
States by the Pacific Eailroad. 



From Omaha to Cheyenne and Denver . . .2 
Excm-sions in Colorado . - . . . . 9 

To Salt Lake City 2 

Stay in Salt Lake City ..... 2 

To Virginia City, and there ..... 2 

To San Francisco, with two days to stop on the way 3 
In and about San Francisco ..... 7 

Yosemite Valley and Big Trees . . . .10 

Overland to Oregon . . . . . .6 

From Portland to Victoria, through Washington Ter- 
ritory and Puget's Sound, and back ... 7 
From Portland to Salt Lake by Columbia River, 
Idaho, and Shoshone Falls .... 8 

From Salt Lake to Omaha . . . . .2 

Total . ... .60 

This is obviously a short allowance for so com- 



'ABU 



\ki 



llrand 



120 APPENDIX. 

prehensive a journey ; but every traveller can en- 
large it to suit his comfort and convenience. He 
cannot advantageously cut down Colorado, San 
Francisco and its neighborhoods, or the Yosemite, 
but may well add a week to each. Another 
month would allow the traveller to return through 
Montana and down the Upper Missouri, besides 
scattering an extra week along through the pre- 
vious portions of his journey. Two months more JNi 
still — or from June 1 to ^November 1 — would 
include, with all the above, a liberal excursion to j 
the Sandwich Islands. And the weather in all 
these five months would be favorable for every | 
part of the grand trip ; only in the Islands would i dmrc 
waterproofs and umbrellas be needed. For the two I bridge 
months' journey we would recommend July and 
August ; for the three, July, August, and Septem- 
ber. California is in its summer glory in April 
and May ; but that is too early for its mountains 
or the Yosenjite ; and the parks and mountains 
of Colorado, though passable in June, are much 
more accessible in July and August. 



deje 
Laran 
BrjaD 



iranc 



[Sta»e 



men- 



iopIi 



jveiy 



Ipril 



TABLE OF RAILEOAD DISTANCES. 121 

'able of Eailroad Distances between the Atlantic 
AND Pacific Oceans. 

Tew York to Chicago 

'joston to Chicago .... 

vhicago to Omaha . . . - 

Pacific Railroad. 

jOmaha to Grand Island . 

iJrand Island to North Platte 

!^orth Platte to Sidney . 

I Sidney to Cheyenne .... 

'Branch road to Denver, 110 miles.] 

jJheyenne to Laramie .... 

Laramie to Bryan .... 

Bryan to Church Buttes . . 

Clhurch Buttes to Bridger 

Bridger to Echo City .... 

Echo City to Ogden 

[Branch road to Salt Lake City, 40 miles, 
and point of union of the Central Pa- 
cific and Union Pacific roads.] 

Ogden to Corinne, Bear Eiver . . . 24 1,054 

Corinne to Promontory City . . 29 1,083 

[Stage lines for Idaho and Montana.] 

Promontory to Monument Point . . 27 1,110 





Miles. 


. 


963 


. 


1,019 


• 


490 


Miles. 




154 


154 


137 


291 


123 


414 


102 


516 


56 


572 


286 


858 


27 


885 


27 


912 


74 


986 


44 


1,030 



122 



APPENDIX. 



Monument Point to Hnmboldt Wells 


142 


1,252 


Humboldt Wells to Elks . 


56 


1,308 


"Stage line to White Pine.' 






Elks to Carlin . . . , . 


23 


1,331 


Carl in to Argenta 


49 


1,380 


Stage line to Austin." 






Argenta to Humboldt . . . 


141 


1,521 


Humboldt to Wadsworth 


68 


1,589 


Wadsworth to Eeno .... 


34 


1,623 


Branch to Virginia City, 17 miles. 






Keno to Truckee 


35 


1,658 


Truckee to summit of Sierra Nevadas . 


14 


1,672 


Summit to Dutch Flat .... 


39 


1,711 


Dutch Flat to Colfax . 


12 


1,723 


Colfax to Sacramento .... 


55 


1,778 


Sacramento to Stockton 


45 


1,823 


Stockton to San Francisco 


79 


1,902 


Chicago to San Francisco . . . 


. 


2,392 


New York to San Francisco . 


• 


3,355 


Boston to San Francisco . 


• 


3,411 


THE END. 







Cambridge : Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company. 



THE 



PACIFIC MILEOAD- OPEN. 



HOW TO GO : WHAT TO SEE. 



A GUIDE FOE TRAVEL TO AND THROUGH 
WESTERN AMERICA. 



BY 

SAMUEL BOWLES, 

AUTHOR OF "across THE CONTINENT," AND "COLORADO, 
ITS PARKS AND MOUNTAINS." 



O BOSTON: 
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 

SUCCESSORS TO TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 
1869. 



THACKERAY'S NOVELS. 



To meet the long-felt want of an edition of Thackeray's Novels, at once 
UJ^IFORM, COMPACT, HAJSfDSOME, JlJSTD CHEAP, MessbS. Fields, 
Osgood, & Co. have prepared and will immediately issue a 

HOUSC:iIOL.D EDITION 

of these unsurpassed works of fiction. 
The style of this edition is in all respects similar to that of the Household 
Edition of Charles Reade's Novels recently published and received with 
immediate and universal favor. The Edition will consist of six volumes, as 
follows : — 

Vanity Pair One Volume. 

Pendennis . " 

The Newcomes ... 

The Virginians .... 
The Adventures of Philip 
Henry Esmond ) 
Level the Widower) 

Handsomely bound in Green Morocco Cloth, with 
gilt back and sides. 

Price, o • • $1.25 a volume. 



" In his subtle, spiritual analysis of men and women, as we see them and 
live with them ; in his power of detecting the enduring passions and desires, 
the strengths, the weaknesses, and the deceits of the race, from under the 
mask of ordinary worldly and town life, — making a dandy or a dancing- 
girl as real, as ' moving delicate and full of life,' as the most heroic incama- 
tipns of good and evil ; in his vitality and yet lightness of handling, doing \t 
once and forever, and never a touch too little or too much, — in all these 
respects he stood and stands alone and matchless." — Dr. John Brown. 



*** This Edition will be sold by all Booksellers, or will be sent, post-paid, on 
receipt of price by the Publishers, 

FIELDS, OSG-OOD, & CO., Boston. 



CHARLES READE'S NOVELS. 

HOUSEHOLD EDITION. 

Uniform, Compact, Legible, Handsome, Cheap. 

The popular Household Edition of Mr. Rbadk's Novels is comprised in 
Eight Volumes, as follows : — 

Foul Play. 1 vol. 
Hard Cash. 1 vol. 

White Lies. 1 vol. 

Griffith Gaunt. 1 vol. 

liove me Little, Love me Long. 1 vol. 
Never too Late to Mend. 1 vol. 

The Cloister and the Hearth. 1 vol. 

Peg Woffington, Christie Johnstone, and 
Other Stories. 1 vol. 
O:^ Pkice, % 1.00 A Volume. The Set in a neat box, $ 8.00 ; 
Half Calf, $ 18.00. 



"This edition of Charles Reade's novels is somewhat similar in style to the 
well-known 'Charles Dickens' series, issued by the same firm. The volumes 
are all neatly bound, well printed, and compact, with the facsimile signature 
of Charles lleade prominently displayed on the outside. We are glad to wel- 
come such an acceptable addition to the American library of modern English 
literature. After Dickens, no English author of the day appeals so directly to 
all branches of the English-speaking race as Charles Reade, Although most 
of his works are intensely English in local coloring, his hatred of class injustice, 
of petty social spites and prejudices, of official wrongs and abuses, and his 
warm sympathy with all the fresh and true impulses and instincts of humanity, 
secure for his works appreciative readers wherever the English language is 
spoken. Charles Reade's works all deserve the widest circle of readers, within 
whose rea,ch they can be brought, and we are glad to find that the task of 
placing them before the American public in a tasteful and convenient library 
form has been undertaken, and so well executed, by those so thoroughly quali- 
fied for carrying it out as the publishers of the present series."— New York 
Times. 

" A very pretty edition of Charles Reade's novels, —just such a one as has 
long been desired by his numerous admirers in this country. It can hardly 
help meeting the success it deserves, from its taste and elegance no less than 
from the conspicuous merits of its author." — Liberal Christian. 

" The new, uniform, elegant, and cheap edition of Charles Reade is just in 
time to take the tide of the story-teller's great and deserved popularity." — 
The Western Bookseller {Chicago). 



*** For sale by all Booksellers. Sent, post-paid^ on receipt of price by the 

FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., Boston. 



r 



Popular Books of Western Travel. 

By SAMUEL BOWLES, 

Editor of the Speingfield (Mass) Republican 



I. ACROSS THE CONTINENT. 

A Stage Ride over the Plains and Mountains to Col- 
orado, THE Mormons, or Utah, Nevada, California, 
Oregon, and Puget's Sound, in the Summer of 1865, 
with Speaker Colfax. 

New Edition. 400 pages. Price, $1.50. 



IL THE SWITZERLAND OP AMERICA ; or, Col- 
orado: its Parks and Mountains. 

A Summer Vacation in Camp and Saddle among the 
Rocky Mountains, in 1868. 

A volume of 175 pages. Price, $1.00. 



" These books," says George Curtis, " are breezy and picturesque ; full of 

information as an egg of meat ; and of perennial interest and value." 

Donald G. Mitchell, in Hearth and Home, says : " Next to a horseback ride 
over the scenes of enchantment, on which Mr. Bowles so fondly dwells, is the 

description of these wonders by his effective pen." The Mew York Eoan- 

gelist s&ys : "The author is a born traveller; at home in the camp and in 
the saddle, and loves to climb mountain heights, and wind down into pic- 
turesque little valleys, and pitch his tent beside the running streams." 

The Sacramento (^California) .Union says : " ' Across the Continent ' is the 
most thorough and exhaustive book ever written about the Pacific Coast." 
The Mew York JVation says : " It has almost as much the charm of nov- 
elty as Palgrave's ' Arabia.' " 



These volumes should be found at all bookstores, and they will be sent by 
mail, postage paid, on receipt of the price by 

SAMUEL BOWLES AND COMPANY, 

Springfield, Mass. 



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